Looking for a pair of DEC RL02 drives, working or otherwise

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 9:12 PM Chris Zach <cz at alembic.crystel.com> wrote:
> > If you have the version of the RL02 that can be jumpered for either
> > RL01 or RL02 use, yes... write-protect the RL01 pack in a modified RL02.
>
> That is a good idea. A DPDT switch could flip to RL01 and engage the
> write protect switch since I forget to do that. A lot.

Indeed.  I haven't done the mod myself (though I might in the near
future as I have a couple of RL01 packs to read out that are not near
my RL01 drive) but ISTR it may take more than one switch.  Just throw
them all one way or the other and you should be fine.

> > ... in 1985... PDP-11... the RL01 was perfect for the boot volume
>
> Same here. I ran a pdp11/03 at home in college and upgraded from RX01's
> to an RL01. The speed was amazing and when I got a second one and an
> 11/23+ cpu I could run RSX11M and Decnet to connect to the school's
> network.

Nice.  Mine started out as an 11/23 (returned from a customer who
bought it from us about eight years previous).  It came in a BA11-N
box with KDF11, memory, a DLV11J, and I think an LPV11.  I had to buy
an RLV11 ($100 at the time) and I eventually got an RXV11 for cheap.

It was a fantastic single-user RT-11 development machine.  The target
for my code was a $50,000 PDP-11/73 with a Fujitsu Eagle and 4MB of
RAM running TSX-11.  I was always happy that I spent less than $500
outfitting myself to write programs for a machine that cost 100 times
as much.

> Still they are a bit tempremental: My current pair of drives give a
> different count of errors even though I have tuned the amps to proper
> values on both of them. Bringing the value up more makes the errors go
> down, maybe I should just crank em up.

Hmm... That's something I've never had to fiddle with.

-ethan