6 May
2005
6 May
'05
5:11 a.m.
On Fri, 06 May 2005 10:10:38 +0200, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
wrote:
On 5/5/05, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>
wrote:
SMD was another drive interface of 20-something years ago
I think we used SMD-drives on our kongsberg SM-4 and KS-500 minicomputers
as early as 1976, but I am not quite certain. The drives in question were
top-loaders with 5-disk Memorex diskpacks. Stored something like 40MB.
...
The ESDI
interface was sort-of like a slightly scaled down SMD
interface.
SMD?
SMD drives were uncommon for PC-class hardware, but were quite common
for minicomputers, especially in the PDP-11 and VAX worlds where
people didn't want to pay DEC's prices for DEC's disks.
I have a couple of Nestar fileservers with 120MB Priam 14" drives. That is
probably as close as you get to PCs using SMD - the diskless PCs booted
off the fileserver.
Does anybody know the bus specs for the Nestar servers? They were not
willing to give out any detailed hardware information, and their software
developer kit was way too expensive. The operating system was Merlin (not
the OS/2 version, this was mid-1980's, something vaguely Unix-like on the
surface of it) running on a 6800 processor.
--
Bj?rn