Update - PDP 11/44 Now on Ebay no reserve

[Ethan Dicks]

On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
>
>> On May 14, 2015, at 07:57, B Degnan <billdeg at buzz1.com> wrote:
>>
>> Good question - not sure what the card cage is used for, I was not
>> expecting to see one in there when I opened it today.  Fortunately the
>> computer itself is not corroded like the card cage in the bottom of the
>> cabinet.  Worst case you can remove the 11/44 from the cabinet entirely.

I would definitely recommend keeping the cabinet.  The 11/44 really
wants to be in that exact cabinet vs a generic 19" rack.

I didn't see any pics of the lower card cage, but I wonder if it's an
SI9900 or similar.  I saw there are two cards of an "SI controller" on
the Unibus.  What Systems Industries did was to have a host controller
(Unibus, Qbus, CMI bus...) and a pair of 40-pin cables to a generic SI
controller that worked with everything, that also had individual SMD
or other disk interfaces.  I've worked with the SI9900 on a couple of
boxes.  For our 11/750, it acted like a DEC controller for RM03 and
RM05-type disks, and even used the same driver, but unless you had
certain models of SMD disk that exactly matched DEC-supplied drives,
you had to patch the drive geometry table each time there was a new
release of VMS (we had a Fujitsu Eagle that was like an RM05 but
larger, so we had to use the patched driver.  We also had a 160MB Fuji
drive that was exactly like two RM03s so we could boot from them with
no trouble).  I don't know a lot about Systems Industries on PDP-11,
but it has to be similar.  That controller might resemble an RH-11 or
something DECish.  You just need drives (and cables) to suit.

-ethan