> > Thanks, that was a question I had been intending to ask, but to confirm: > If one obtained (as appropriate) bare RX01/2 floppy drive(s), it would just > be a > matter of power supply for the floppies, and passive cabling to interface the > drives > to the CPU/display?
Depends on what you mean by 'bare floppy drives'. An RX01/RX02 (all versions, rackmount, tabletop, etc) contains a pair of totally bare drives (no electronics at all), a PSU, and 2 PCBs. One is essentially the stuff you would expect to find on floppy drives (read/write, stepper drivers etc), the other is a microcoded controller (TTL in the RX01, AM2900 in the RX02). The host interface is a custom serial one, The rackmount units use a 40 wire Berg cable to link to the bus interface in the PDP8/PDP11. In the tabletop unit (and I assume the pedestal, but I have never seen one) there is a little PCB with a Berg plug and a DB25 connector that links to the controller board. It is just the connectors, no electronics. It route the signals to pins on the DB25. So if you got a complete rackmount RX01/RX02 you could make up a special cable to link it to the DECMate. I did the reverse to link a tabletop unit to a RX8E. -tony