More AT&T UNIX PC

Well, I was able to get my full backup and full set of system software disks made just in time. The hard drive gave up the ghost last night. It's making horrible bearing noises, and an attempt to re-initialize the disk and check for bad blocks overflows the bad block table almost instantly. It's dead, Jim. Not at all surprising, given its age. It may even be fixable, but I'm on to bigger and better things. I've started scoping out the work needed to build a hard drive emulator board that will connect to the WD1010 socket and behave like a storage subsystem, with an SD card and/or USB on the other end. The work is being helped tremendously by looking at Philip Pemberton's "3b1emu" source code, which implements an emulated WD2010 in software. If things go according to plan, I hope to have a proof of concept board kludged together on protoboard in a month or so. [an aside: nothing ever goes according to plan] -Seth