--- Joe <rigdonj(a)cfl.rr.com> wrote: Anything?!? Almost certainly. More than coast-to-coast shipping? That all depends. I have several that I have used on my PDP-8/a. AFAIK, every controller (including the RL8A) that talks to an RL02 will also talk to an RL01. In the world of VAXen and PDP-11s, nearly everybody converted to RL02s as soon as they could - same amount of floorspace and power but twice the storage (10MB vs 5MB). I had a customer in 1987 that had RL01s on their 11/34-based inspection system, but that was, in effect, a packaged system (it was used to measure tooling for manufacturing artificial diamond; the CPU was the *cheap* part of the rig :-) The PDP-11/23 I did my work on had an RL01 as the system device (mine). My boss loaned me an RL02 that we used to exchange data files with our client. I would say that these days, it's probably easier to find RL02 packs than RL02 packs. The drives themselves are (depending on the exact rev of the boards) nearly identical. With later rev boards, *the* difference is the heads and the strapping of a few jumpers. There was an occasionally-performed mod to make the stepper board switch between RL01 and RL02 behavior (and assert Write Protect in RL01 mode) that let you *read* RL01 packs or read/write RL02 packs in the same drive, but you had to have a drive that you were willing to not have on a service contract. RL01 packs are clearly marked and use a brown color scheme. RL02 packs have blue labels. Neither are user formattable (embedded servo, factory prepped). Did you find a quantity of them, or just see one or two float by? Given the relative cost of RL02s these days, unless you have some RL01 packs to read (or drives to repair), they aren't particularly valuable. Under PDP-11 and VAX operating systems, you might as well hold out for the 10MB size. Under OS/8, AFAIK, the RL01 and RL02 are partitioned differently because both are larger than the max device size (I have a couple of RL01 packs with OS/8 on them, but I've never had an RL02 on my RL8A - back when I paid $600 for the controller and $150 for each RL01 drive, I couldn't afford the $1000 for an RL02 nor $200 per pack!) Depending on how old the absolute filter is, the entire drive might be cheaper than just the filter. Dunno how you'd evaluate it though, absent accurate operators logs. *I* like them, but then I never had any problems with them - never lost a drive; never had a head crash; never lost any data (but I can say the same thing for RL02s, so go figure). -ethan

Pretty good drive for a PDP 8/A system, with the RL02 having twice as much storage as the RL01. I dont know how many people are running 8/A's and are looking for a mass storage device though. -Lawrence LeMay