new disks, old DEC (was Re: 4.3BSD Quasijarus)

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sat, Dec 27, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Patrick Finnegan
<pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 27 December 2008, Ethan Dicks wrote:
>> It sure would be nice to find a Unibus SCSI card that looked to the
>> system like a UDA50...
>
> My UC18 seems to work like that, and I've had it up and running on my
> 11/780 with both VMS (a few different releases) and 4BSD.

Nice.

> Unfortunately for you, I'm not willing to give it up (and I only have
> one)\.

Fair enough.  I wouldn't mind eventually finding a UC17 or UC18 myself, though.

>  A potentially easier (and definately less expensive) path you
> might try is a Qniverter and QBUS SCSI card, which could be had for
> less than $100 each, last I was looking at this stuff.

I already have a couple of Qbus SCSI cards, but I'll have to check
which ones might be TMSCP only.

>  After I found
> the UC18, though (in the 11/780 I'm using it in even), I gave up on
> that path. 2U or so for a small 4-quad slot QBUS box shouldn't be too
> hard to come up with. :)  With some trickery, you could probably mount
> the SCSI disk in there too, since there will be plenty of left-over
> space.

Well... in a BA-11, there's plenty of room.  I even have a DEC 18-bit
"Qniverter" for putting an IBV11 on an 11/34 (it came with a DDV11C,
if you can imagine such a thing).  I should dig that out and see if I
can get it working.

It won't solve the problem of how to put a SCSI disk _in_ an 11/750
(using the internal DD11D backplane) or inside my 11/725.  It would
probably work fine in my 11/44 or an 11/70, though.

>> Not all of the "good old days" were as good as we'd like to remember.
>
> Oh, now that's not something that I'd expect someone in this group to
> say. :)

I see the smiley there, but as someone who has been playing with DEC
equipment since 1982, some stuff is brilliant, and some stuff drove us
downright nuts.  Fortunately, there were many more brilliant moments.

-ethan