24 Feb
2021
24 Feb
'21
8:06 a.m.
On 02/24/2021 08:06 AM, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:
Well, just the guts inside
an RM05, that was a 9762 drive
relabeled by DEC.
Jon
Sort of. MASSBUS was a very overpriced and to be honest
weird system that DEC developed in an attempt to be like
IBM and charge very high markups for generic peripherals.
While it did support a variety of interface formats (I
don't think the RS03 and 04 were SMD, and I know the RP07
was *not* SMD) the industry quickly centered on SMD and
that was that.
OOOOhhh, the RP07! I have stories about that drive!
It was a Burroughs mainframe drive they reprogrammed for
DEC. It had a number of issues.
The worst one was that due to some microcode bugs, it was
possible to trash an occasional track descriptor record.
When a bad TDR was read, the drive totally locked up, you
had to cycle power to reset it. VMS recovered from it quite
gracefully, however. They finally fixed it, it required
replacing about 10 boards. Then, there was a procedure to
rewrite all the TDRs. The DEC FE assured me it would not
touch user data. Well, after running the procedure, it came
up as a blank disk! YIKES! A quick check at the binary
level showed data was still on the drive, but the RMS-11
home block had been overwritten. Well, I had a program that
could examine the home blocks, and I knew where to find the
backup home blocks. So, I hacked that program to copy the
backup block to the main one, and then change the checksums
to agree.
The other issue is the voice coil could suck dirty air in
during long seeks, so they had ti replace the HDA and put a
filter over the air exhaust from the voice coil.
Yes, the TM02 and TM03 formatters allowed MASSBUS to
connect to Pertec drives, but I don't think you could run
a tape drive and a disk drive on the same MASSBUS channel
anyway. Wonder why, technically the MASSBUS cable is just
an extension of the Unibus, so it shouldn't matter much
what combination of cables you used. Maybe they just wrote
different drivers or something.
MASSBUS was not anything like a UNIBUS, it was a lot closer
to an IBM channel bus and tag cable.
Anybody knows
if there was conversion kit to equip CDC
9762 and 9766 type SMD drives into MASSBUS drives much
like the TU81 could be turned into a TA81 (SDI)?