PDP-8: anyone tried NVRAM simulation of hard drives?

From: Bob Shannon <bshannon_at_tiac.net>
Date: Sat Feb 1 07:42:01 2003

I beleive that Al got a few (one or two?) Augat wire-wrap quad DEC
modules along with the CADR
hardware. There was at least one quad unibus Chaos net interface board.
 This board may be slightly
interesting historically, but its unstuffed and I don't beleive that any
drivers existed for it.

To the best of my knowledge, it was an abandoned incomplete hack.

You might want to unwrap the board, then use it for a PDP-8 project.

I'd guess that using the Dallas NVRAM (really excellent products by the
way) to emulate a PDP-8 disk
would be much simpler than my IDE hack. A simple 20 Mhz PIC would
probably be more than sufficient.

But I have no idea of what an omnibus interface looks like electrically.
 Is this a painful thing to build?

Eric Smith wrote:

>Will J wrote:
>
>>Omnibus or Posibus? Why not Negibus? Neither Omnibus nor Posibus would
>>help me on my 8/i, since mine is Negibus...
>>
>
>One problem with building either posibus or negibus devices is that
>DEC connector blocks seem to be made of unobtanium these days. At
>one time there were some made by other vendors, which were generally
>inferior to the DEC ones, but it doesn't appear that any are available
>now.
>
>Building an Omnibus card doesn't require any DEC connector blocks,
>making it somewhat easier.
>
>It would be nice to find a source of the DEC plastic module handles,
>and the metal stiffener/ejector handles used on DEC hex-height modules.
>But I'm not holding my breath for those, either.
Received on Sat Feb 01 2003 - 07:42:01 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:35:52 BST