16 Apr
2007
16 Apr
'07
1:43 a.m.
Allison wrote:
Sounds nice. I have a few BA-11VA (four dual width
slots)
and it's a challange to put enough boards to make a bootable
viable sytem in that. An 11/23, 256k ram, DLV11J and a Rom
card was full house and for storage the only choice was TU58
or Tu58 emulation (requires bukly balky PC).
Jerome Fine replies:
For this example (I assume this is an M8186), there
were dual MFM and ESDI controllers which have boot
ROMs for the hard drive (non-DEC of course). I still
use my dual ESDI controller. I no longer have the
MFM controller, but that was all the VT103 originally
had which was essential to run and boot an operating
system such as RT-11.
I don't know if any of those dual MFM controllers are
still available, but when they were initially released,
they cost more than a SCSI Qbus host adapter. As a
consequence, a TU-58 would certainly have been a low cost
(and very slow) alternative.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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