On Dec 27, 2015 2:36 AM, "Noel Chiappa" <[email protected]> wrote: > > > From: Guy Sotomayor > > > It's typical of most of the vintage gear. Folks save the CPUs and ditch > > the peripherals. > > It's not entirely sloth and stupidity, though. Disk drives in particular > (usually the biggest issue in this area) are complex precision machinery that > operate at very high speeds, etc, and working on them is a formidable job, > and requires specialized parts which are, in general, no longer available. > > > I think the biggest problem is that there isn't a spec per-se on > > Massbus. A lot of reverse engineering will be required to make it work > > properly in all cases. > > If it were done, though, that would be wonderful, especially for people with > PDP-11/70's; the UNIBUS on those machines is reputedly the slowest of any > PDP-11, so having mass storage on the MASSBUS is really necessary for good > performance. (Apologies for my -11 centrism in an IBM-focused thread... :-)
No apologies needed. Yea more: pdp-10s. Massbus is the *only* option for those. There are KS10 CPUs in particular - including mine - lying idle for want of Massbus storage. I'm nearly there; I have a beautiful RM03 which should work - but no bootable packs. I have a bunch of -10 RP06 packs - but no drives. I don't have an operable Massbus tape. > But finding the connectors (and probably the cables too) is going to be a > cast-iron nightmare. Maybe we could settle on an alternative (the way I think > we should switch to pairs of dual cards with Berg/DuPont headers, with > standard flat cables between them, to replace the now-unobtainable BC11-A's - > DEC showed this works, with the M9014/M9042..) > > Noel Certainly no need to slavishly reproduce the connectors and cables. Emulation could plug in at the Berg level, direct to the Massbus controller - or even at the board level, plugging straight into the backplane (c.f. Guy's MEM-11) and replace the controller too. Mike
