I have 3 working RK05 drives on my PDP-11/40 and have
used them to
successfully read and copy the data from RK05 packs that had not been
spun up since the 1970s and early 1980s, but I guess I'm on the wrong
side of the ocean.
Unfortunately so am I as I'm in Texas and the disk is in Scotland - that's
the main reason I'm looking for a UK site to help, as otherwise I'ld grab
it and hop on a plane to the Netherlands and take Fred up on his offer -
it would seem fitting to return the pack to .NL after all these years :-)
Good luck with recovering the data. I know what
it's like to finally recover
data from a pack that has been lying dormant for nearly 30 years. It's
quite an exciting feeling, especially if it's stuff that you or your associates
developed and you had once written it off as "lost forever".
Yes it is. Our project (Edinburgh Computer History Project) has actually
recovered four or five otherwise lost OS's already and every one has been
a delight. We do have a few remaining which we're afraid really are
gone forever, but there's at least 2, maybe 3, for which we have paper
listings that we hope to get our hands on this year.
Meanwhile I'm holding off on saying yes to Fred in the hope that
someone within the UK has a working PDP11 that'll read the RK05.
Ashley
By the way, while on the subject of PDP11's, is there anyone with
experience of simh who would like to try to boot a system off some
floppy images I have? I tried and failed. They're the 501Kb files
in this directory:
http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/os/deimos/disk-images/
O/S documentation and source is here:
http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/history/BrianGilmore
thanks to all who have responded; I'm replying off list to keep
the noise down.
Graham