On 10/14/09, Rick Bensene <rickb at bensene.com> wrote:
> OMSI had a Straight-8, with quite a bit of RAM(er...core something
like 24K?),
one of the fixed head
disk drives
(was it RA32?)...
Probably a DF32. "R" for disks came a short time later (like with the
RF08 or RK8). The "F" means "fixed" in DEC's naming scheme,
while "A"
would mean it's an SDI disk (RA60, RA70, RA80, RA81, RA92...)
Yup, that's it...DF32. It was housed in a full-height rack. I recall
the controller filled quite a bit of the rack...seemed the controller
was more complex than the Straight-8. I remember that the folks there
were always very afraid of power failures. I was there once when the
power did bounce a bit, and everyone got very nervous that the drive
might crash. It seemed to make it through OK.
Another thing I remember is that one time something went awry with the
DECTape controller. A DEC FSE came to fix it. Turned out it was
something with the power supply for the controller. The power supply
was replaced, but somehow a connection got swapped somewhere, and when
it was powered up, the controller let out all of its magic smoke. It
took a couple of weeks before the controller was fixed.
Somewhere around here I have a DECTape from that system...I took an
assembly language programming class there and my class project (printing
text banner pages on the Centronix printer) files were on the tape.
-Rick
