Tu10 pdp11

[Henk Gooijen]

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- 
From: william degnan
Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2015 5:40 PM
To: cctech
Subject: Re: Tu10 pdp11

Ok.  I checked my tu10, it has the backplane, it is a master.  I see where
it connects using the backplane cable to the pdp11.  I never worked with a
TU10 before and I was looking to see if references to the tm11 were
"module/card" or backplane interface.  I surprisingly found little
commentary or threads about the TU10 / TM11,  other than DEC docs.  I guess
these are not super common or people who have them have not often reached
out to the classic cmp community, that I could find in a search.

Bill Degnan
twitter: billdeg
vintagecomputer.net
On Sep 5, 2015 3:37 AM, "Eric Smith" <spacewar at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 6:14 PM, william degnan <billdegnan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Reading docs on DEC TU10 for pdp 11 one makes a serial connection, 
> > right?
> > Not sure because I found little about baud, etc.
>
> No.
>
> > I did not see any definitive controller card for UNIBUS pdp 11.  Maybe I
> am
> > missing something..can anyone share experiences?
>
> A TU10 master drive contains electronics[*] which allows it to be
> interfaced to a PDP-11 TM11 tape control. Said electronics is probably
> what's known as a formatter, though I haven't studied the TU10 in
> detail so I'm not 100% certain.
>
> A master TU10 can be used with up to seven TU10, TU20, TU30, or TU40
> slave transports.
>
> The TM11 controller has its own backplane, and may be mounted in the
> TU10 master drive. It connects to PDP-11 using the usual BC11-A Unibus
> cables.

======
I may be wrong, but then again, this might be useful ...
The TE16 is nearly (?) identical to the TU10. My guess is that the TU10
is just a bit older. My TE16 has a MASSBUS interface, so I cannot
compare on that side. However, the TE16 also is either master or slave.
And to a master can be connected 7 slaves. The interconnection is three
40-wire flat cables.
ISTR that the interface for the TU10 is a 4-slot backplane, and I
think it is called TMB11. The TMB11 is also used to hook up the TS03.
So you need the 4-slot backplane in the master tape drive, and the
4-slot TMB11 backplane in the CPU or expansion box.
This is from (old) memory cells, so I could be wrong!
- Henk