Happy DEC-10 everyone!

[Ian King]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-
> bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Rich Alderson
> Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 12:31 PM
> To: 'General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts'
> Subject: RE: Happy DEC-10 everyone!
> 
> From: Pontus Pihlgren
> Sent: Saturday, December 11, 2010 1:12 AM
> 
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 05:37:33PM -0500, William Donzelli wrote:
> 
> >> The problem with running a KS10 is that there is a very restrictive
> >> list of disks and tapes it will play with.
> 
> > Didn't Ian and the guys at the Living Computer Museum (formerly
> > PDPplanet) work on a massbuss "emulator" of sorts? That should be
> > modifiable to work with the 18 bit KS-10 version?
> 
> > Or am I missing something? I'm unsure what happened with that
> project.
> 
> As it happens, we are about to send out the artwork for the second
> revision
> of the Massbus Disk Emulator this week (a project which predates Ian by
> a
> couple of years!).  We've been waiting for Rabbit to bring out a faster
> processor than the one in the original design, and changing the way
> that
> register shadowing is done.
> 
> There is no such thing, by the way, as "the 18 bit KS-10 version"--
> Massbus
> is Massbus, no matter whether it is talking to an RH20 on a KL-10, an
> RH70
> on a PDP-11/70, an RH15 on a PDP-15, or an RH11 on other PDP-11 models.
> They're *all* 18 bits of data, though the 16-bit systems don't use 2
> bits
> of that.
> 
> Anyway, the MDE looks like a string of disks on a Massbus channel (only
> RP06 currently, but that will change soon) to the vintage system.  Disk
> images are represented as directories of track files on an FTP server.
> (100baseT Ethernet keeps up with Massbus very nicely.)
> 
> Once we have more than the breadboard prototype running (on the 2065
> that
> Ian mentioned up-thread), we'll hook one to a KS-10, as well as to our
> PDP-11/70 and PDP-11/45, and see what we can shake loose.
> 

I'm looking forward to qualifying it on our VAX-11s, too, so we can run Ultrix on one of them.  -- Ian