Looking for....RL02 controller for PDP-8E M8433?

--- Peter Turnbull <pete(a)dunnington.u-net.com> wrote: Not that you can use it (see below), but I bought one (RL8A) from a DEC reseller for well under $100 a couple of years ago (either $30 or $60, I can't remember now). Cables are hard to come by, though. I understand that feeling - it took me years to track down an RK8E at a decent price (swap) - I've had a 16-sector RK05F pack since 1984 and have never read it (and still can't - no RK05F drive/heads) At least thanks to David Gesswein, I have one 16-sector RK05J pack. Yes. One RL8A (M8433) can talk to up to 4 drives, and you can have up to two RL8As in one OMNIBUS (but there aren't enough driver slots in OS/8 to view all those partitions at once - you have to juggle around a bunch). True. Now... if you have an -8/a hex-wide *chassis*, you can mount the KK8E CPU board set in there, or, IIRC, with OMNIBUS extension cables, you can attach the -8/a chassis to the -8/e backplane, but if all you have is a single -8/e box, you are out of luck. I have my -8/e in test mode with the PSU sitting *next to* its box - there's room for hex cards then, but I wouldn't want to run that way full-time. There aren't a lot of hard disk options for a quad-wide box... floppy (RX8E), RK05 (RK8E) and older stuff (through an external bus converter). By the time newer disks came out, DEC was only selling hex-wide 12-bit boxes, and all the new devices could fit on a single hex-height card instead of several quad-height cards, so there you are. There might be a third party quad disk controller or two, but I can't quote vendor and model numbers. My machines are 100% DEC. -ethan