Dec-10 Day announcement from Living Computers: Museum + Labs

[Rich Alderson]

Happy DEC-10 Day!

It is my honor to announce that we at Living Computers: Museum + Labs
are releasing to the computing community our Massbus Disk Emulator
and all the associated software.  This device connects via Massbus
cables to the RH10 and RH20 interfaces on KI-10 and KL-10 systems, to
the RH11 interface on KS-10 and small PDP-11 systems (including the
front end 11/40 on the KL-10), and to the RH70 on the PDP-11/70.  The
MDE provides up to 8 emulated RP06 or RP07 disks (represented by disk
files in the format used by the SimH emulation of these systems).

We expect that it will also work with the RH780 on the VAX-11/780 and
VAX-11/785 although we have not yet tested it in this configuration.

The original MDE was designed by Keith Perez in 2005, and emulated up
to four RP06 drives connected to a KL-10.  The current generation was
a redesign by Bruce Sherry in conjunction with the restoration of our
DECsystem-1070 in 2012, and initially provided eight RP06 drives on
the RH10.  It has undergone continual development, with associated
software created for us by Bob Armstrong, and is now being opened up
for the use of the relevant communities.

To this end, we have placed the design files for the hardware and the
source files for the software to interface with it, along with our
library of Universal Peripheral Emulator routines, on public access
repositories at Github.  The URLs for these repositories are

        https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/MDE2

        https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/MBS

        https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/UPELIB

These are released under a very liberal license which will allow for
free use of the MDE by any interested party.

Happy Dec-10 Day!

                                                                Rich


Richard Alderson, Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

Cell: (206) 465-2916
Desk: (206) 342-2239

http://www.livingcomputerss.org/