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

From: Dr. Charles E. Morris <c.morris_at_townsqr.com>
Date: Mon Jan 27 18:50:51 2003

Has anyone had interfaced nonvolatile RAM to a PDP-8 to simulate an original
hard drive? The DF32 fully expanded with four disks was only 256k x 12...
Dallas Semi makes battery-backed NVRAM in a variety of sizes. Two DS1258
(each 128k x 16) would make for a very simple interface that would fit on a
single card (or at most a double card). Packing the 12-bit words would
complicate the interface a little but lower the cost of the NVRAMs.

Using an old 3.5 or 5.25 inch hard drive would be very cheap per meg but
would also require development of a controller (like the 8051 mentioned
recently as an interface to an HP computer). I don't think there were any
original drives greater than 1 Mword available, so larger ones would require
nonstandard code to support them anyway.

Any thoughts?
-Charles
Received on Mon Jan 27 2003 - 18:50:51 GMT