Other then being original is there any reason to get a RX02 ?

[Ethan Dicks]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Pete Lancashire
<pete at petelancashire.com> wrote:
> Someday I want to have a PDP11 even if it is a QBUS version
>
> I can get a clean RX02 for about $150. When my life involved PDP11's
> starting with 34A and ending with 44's I never used one.

They are useful on low-end systems, like an RT-11 machine when you
don't have some form of hard drive (RQDXn + RD5x or RL(V)11 + RL01 or
RL02, etc...)  If you have a PDP-11 with a hard drive, they can be
handy for trading files with another machine with an RX02, but if you
don't need 8" floppies, and you have another option, they aren't
essential.  As you have already experienced, there are plenty of
machines that don't/didn't have them.

At one point, they were an obvious choice for a small machine.  Unless
you are dead set on a 100% DEC box, I think there are plenty of
options that don't involve floppies.  One inexpensive one is TU58
emulation (via PC-based or microcontroller-based tape emulator + one
spare serial port on your PDP-11, easy in the Qbus world because the
DLV11J is cheap and plentiful)

If you want a 100% authentic machine, there are lots of configurations
that would include an RX02.

Oh... and if you want to also dabble with the PDP-8, the same RX02
would be useful on an RX8E, and that was a very ordinary PDP-8
configuration (and much easier to put together than a hard-disk-based
machine, because there are fewer options there).

-ethan