New subject: PDP11 non-rotating memory disk

3 Feb 2001

...
 If I remember correctly, the Pentium came out around
1993, about four
years after the 486 came out around 1989.  If the engineering, design and
...
 technical capability that led to the Pentium had been
around in 1980, the
...
 technical superiority that the PDP-11 enjoyed over the
PC might have
pushed DEC hard enough to upgrade the PDP-11 systems. 

Ah, is that hit on the head healing or is the ethanol talking...  DEC did
improve the PDP-11.  Back in the 70s they created the VAX and just
when pentium getting remotely close there was Alpha.

...
 For commercial systems, operation at the high end can
also be
compared in favour of E11.  With a fast Pentium III and E11,
running PDP-11 software is less expensive and faster than with
the fastest PDP-11 hardware. 

E11 may be good and all but it runs on PCs and their record for
reliability
is not that of a native PDP-11... yet!

...
 But back to my original question and Zane's
response plus the low
price of memory.  Might it be possible to design and produce a
Qbus board which uses memory as the disk and have an interface
like the HD: on E11 rather than MSCP?  Considering that from
the lack of a response on my original question in regard to the
use of the 8 MByte of memory, it may be just as easy to start
from scratch.  By the way, on the "Full" commercial E11, the
command is: "MOUNT  HD0:  RAM:/SIZE:bytes"
and HD0: can be replaced by any of the emulated drives as well. 

Nonrotataing didks for PDP-11s are really old news, seems EMC
and AMPEX were names I remember.

Allison

uVAX II Memory Board