On 2/26/2021 8:40 AM, Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk wrote:
Toby Thain wrote:
Rich Alderson wrote:
You could ask our friends Keith Perez (Massbus Disk Emulator v1) and
Bruce Sherry (MDE v2) about it, or even ask me. ... produced, and
we had to do something. My brilliant friend Keith sat down with a
logic analyzer and an RP06 attached to a KL-10, and proceeded to
spend the next two years (when not called on for other projects)
creating a disk emulator. ...
Later, Bruce came on board as the museum was ramping up, and redid
the design in a Xilinx chip with VHDL. ...
Are the above projects published?
See here:
https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum?tab=repositories
Also here is Rich's announcement on DEC-10 day of 2017
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/
--
John H. Reinhardt
