4 Jun
2005
4 Jun
'05
1:07 a.m.
Hi,
Tony Duell said:
Summat like that.
I have a device that plugs into a serial port on a PC and looks like a
disk drive to an Atari 800. Is there such a thing for RT-11? It seems
like it should be possible to write a disk driver that uses a serial
port and some sort of serial protocol to communicate with a PC and make
RT-11 think it is accessing a local disk drive. Has anyone done
If you'll accept it emulating a tape drive, make it emulate the TU58.
That has an asynchornous host interface (which is trivial to turn into
RS232), and a fairly simple protocol which is documented in the user
manual IIRC. The TU58 is a block-structured device, so it is pretty
similar to a (very slow) disk to the software.
There must be an RT11 driver for it (DD.SYS?)
I think there used to be unix-based software to
emulate a TU58 (so that a
PDP11 conneccted to a serial port on the unix machine thought it had a
TU58 connected). It must still be around somewhere.
Not just unix, there's TU58.EXE for DOS out there somewhere, google will
find it. I've got it running on my DOS computer (used for all sorts of
old MSDOS stuff) connected to my Micro 11/73. It allows me to ftp
tape images from any computer on the network and transfer them to/from the
PDP. The PDP, of course, just sees it as drive DD: as you'd expect.
Depending on the PDP OS you can fool it into seeing tapes bigger tha
256K which is useful. Works with RT-11v5 anyway.
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb at dial.pipex.com
The future was never like this!