28 Aug
2014
28 Aug
'14
12:15 p.m.
The good news is the head technology is pretty primitive, they fly fairly high (compared
to 3330) so there
is a chance that the mech and pack can be inspected and cleaned so that it doesn't
crash the second you try
to load the heads. It is roughly equivalent to RK05 tech in the DEC world.
Interesting you should mention the RK05, the 11/34 with the RP03 drives has both an RK05 F
and J.
I'm fairly confident we can get the RK drives working, and grab images of the / and
/usr file systems, which is a great start on getting this version of unix back. The
source code for the OS is on an RP03 pack, and I'm not sure I will have access to the
hardware long enough to try and get the controller and a drive working.
There are a LOT of M-series modules in an RP-11. I remember the data separator (and all
the other twiddly
pot stuff) to be pretty touchy.
It's interesting to note that this system actually has a second RP11 controller,
condition unknown, not connected (and apparently never powered up since it was bought at
auction 17 years ago). The one connected to the drives has a controller fault of some
kind at power up, no specific info available yet.