12 Oct
1999
12 Oct
'99
3:55 a.m.
I either need to find someone who knows what they're doing with a TU77,
or someone who has and can get rid of a TM03 formatter for a TU77 with the
special 18-bit card.
Chris Zach (cz(a)alembic.crystel.com) has the MIT-AI KS10, and wants to run
ITS on it, but his tape drive (A TU77) is screwed up. It generates a
FORMATTER ERROR in the Status register whenever it's on.
He has booted from drives on the same Massbus so that's OK.
Having a real '10 with ITS on the 'net again would be a really good thing.
Does anyone think they can help this guy?
-------
12 Oct
12 Oct
4:07 a.m.
I either need to find someone who knows what
they're doing with a TU77,
or someone who has and can get rid of a TM03 formatter for a TU77 with the
special 18-bit card.
I'm pretty good with TM03/TU77 on 16 bit hardware, but I've got no
experience on the 10's.
Was this TM03 originally installed on the KS or has it come from
somewhere else. I'm wondering if it's got all the correct varients
for the TU77 and 18 bit bit fidler.
Anyone have a TM03 print set that I can look at...
It's been 13 years since I scoped one out.
Bill
---
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org
Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC,
The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.
5:23 a.m.
On Tue, 12 Oct 1999 05:55:24 -0700 "Daniel A. Seagraves"
<DSEAGRAV(a)toad.xkl.com> wrote:
I either need to find someone who knows what
they're doing with a TU77,
or someone who has and can get rid of a TM03 formatter for a TU77 with the
special 18-bit card.
I have a TU77 and TM03 from a Decsystem-20, which means
that it's the 18-bit version.
I'd be glad to help get the MIT machine running again!
The problem is going to be transport... the TU77 is in
Bristol, UK. Is it worth trying to ship the drive back
to the USA?
I'd be only too pleased to re-claim the space in my garage
that the TU77 takes up :-)
--
John Honniball
Email: John.Honniball(a)uwe.ac.uk
University of the West of England
5:31 a.m.
I forwarded that off to Chris, since it's his machine.
I don't know if he'd need the whole drive or not, but I bet shipping it
would be killer.
How much do those things weigh, anyway?
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6:55 a.m.
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8:06 a.m.
A LOT, we've got two of them resting on the first floor because the
levator is broken and we haven't had enough people to boost them up the
stairs. We'll be following this thread closely because we're slowly
trying to get the SPI KS-10's going.
On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, Daniel A. Seagraves wrote:
I forwarded that off to Chris, since it's his
machine.
I don't know if he'd need the whole drive or not, but I bet shipping it
would be killer.
How much do those things weigh, anyway?
-------
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
215 Shady Lea Road,
North Kingstown, RI 02852
"Casta est qui nemo rogavit."
- Ovid
12:22 p.m.
Chris Zach (cz(a)alembic.crystel.com) has the MIT-AI
KS10, and wants to run
ITS on it, but his tape drive (A TU77) is screwed up. It generates a
FORMATTER ERROR in the Status register whenever it's on.
He has booted from drives on the same Massbus so that's OK.
Well, you've explained one problem already. You're not supposed to put
disk drives and tape drives on the same Massbus.
2:09 p.m.
[Can't put tapes and disks on the same Massbus]
Okay, I'm now officially confused by this whole Massbus thing.
I'll explain how I thought it worked, and you all tell me where I'm wrong.
The RH10 is a disk controller. It has one massbus coming out of it.
Disks and tapes can plug into the Massbus - Just not both at the same time.
I don't know why.
In order to talk to the RH10, which is the massbus disk controller, you need
a DF10 in front of it (Or were there other channel interfaces?). A DF10
is a small processor that knows how to read from the RH10 and write to memory.
It's a DMA controller. (Can it talk to more than one thing at a time? Does
it have it's own bus?)
The massbus was 3 cables - 2 data cables and a control cable.
They talk between the drives and had a decent bandwidth.
All of the transfers on the massbus are either data moving between the controller and the
drives, (Stuff from the registers on the drives), or data moving
between the controller and the DF10. (Data being read from the disks.)
The DF10 then plunks the data into memory and alerts the RH10 when it's done.
The RH10 then PIs the processor (if enabled) and sets its DONE bit and such.
-------
13 Oct
13 Oct
4 a.m.
Chris Zach
(cz(a)alembic.crystel.com) has the MIT-AI KS10, and wants to run
ITS on it, but his tape drive (A TU77) is screwed up. It generates a
FORMATTER ERROR in the Status register whenever it's on.
He has booted from drives on the same Massbus so that's OK.
Well, you've explained one problem already. You're not supposed to put
disk drives and tape drives on the same Massbus.
5:02 a.m.
I think our KS10 has separate ports for the massbuss marked disk and
tape, but I'd have to double check to be sure I'm not thinking of
something else.
On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Bill Pechter wrote:
It's because of software limitations and (If I remember correctly)
disk and tape drives used different numbers of massbus registers
so you have to jumper (in the PDP11 case) the RH differently.
Don't know about the 10's though. Vax RH780's could do both disks and
tapes on the same massbus.
Bill
---
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org
Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC,
The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
215 Shady Lea Road,
North Kingstown, RI 02852
"Casta est qui nemo rogavit."
- Ovid
Chris Zach (cz(a)alembic.crystel.com) has the MIT-AI
KS10, and wants to run
ITS on it, but his tape drive (A TU77) is screwed up. It generates a
FORMATTER ERROR in the Status register whenever it's on.
He has booted from drives on the same Massbus so that's OK.
Well, you've explained one problem already. You're not supposed to put
disk drives and tape drives on the same Massbus.
7:17 a.m.
I wrote:
Well, you've explained one problem already.
You're not supposed to put
disk drives and tape drives on the same Massbus.
Bill Pechter <pechter(a)pechter.dyndns.org> wrote:
It's because of software limitations and (If I
remember correctly)
disk and tape drives used different numbers of massbus registers
so you have to jumper (in the PDP11 case) the RH differently.
And since the KS10 uses a variant of the RH11, it has the same limitation.
That's why there are two RH11s in a KS10. In theory it apparently can
handle three, but I've not heard of anyone installing a third, and I
don't know whether the software supports it.
Don't know about the 10's though. Vax
RH780's could do both disks and
tapes on the same massbus.
Might be possible on the RH10 or RH20, but I don't think software
supports it.
9044
days inactive
9045
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10 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
at258＠osfn.org -
DSEAGRAV＠toad.xkl.com -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
John.Honniball＠uwe.ac.uk -
pechter＠pechter.dyndns.org