18 Sep
2001
18 Sep
'01
4:53 a.m.
Very good point. I was thinking that it would be nice
to have a machine that
was a PDP-11 as soon as you flipped on the power, but probably not worth the
cost and hassle of the flash. Didn't some of the VAXen boot their microcode
from a floppy?
Yes, the VAX 11/780 does.
Actually a more compelling idea for me would be to reverse engineer the
processor on a modern disk drive (like a SCSI drive) and then reprogram the
disk controller boards firmware such that the disk thought it was a PDP-11.
It would be fairly straight forward (but certainly not trivial) to
construct a communication protocol for this.
Interestingly, the DEC DSSI drives are nearly already "there" when it comes
to this sort of scenario. There already is a communications protocol that
lets you "log in" to the drive and talk to a variety of programs that are
stored in the Disk drives flash. It may actually have a real PDP-11 on it,
I don't know who might know what all the parts are on a DSSI drive.
--Chuck