Joe,
The SMS FWD0106 is a disk controller for both floppies and hard drives.
It actually consists of two cards: an interface that connects to the
QBus or the Unibus (there are two versions) and a formatter card that
connects to the interface card. (The formatter card can plug into the
QBus or Unibus to get power, or it can be fed power by a connector;
the formatter card does not use any QBus or Unibus signals.)
The formatter handles both 5.25 and 8 inch floppies (one type at a time)
and various types of MFM harddrives. There are several types of harddrives
that you can use, depending on the ROM version on the formatter. The
floppies can be RX01 or RX02 compatible, or can be a double-sided version
of the RX02. The harddrive interface does not correspond to any DEC
drive type. You need a special SMS driver for this card for RT-11, or
there is an OEM version of 2.9BSD that supports this card.
I have a number of these, and managed to get in 1989 a set of the last
version of the ROMs from SMS just before they went out of business. These
ROMs support about a couple of dozen MFM disk types, most of them pretty
old.
If you have some EPROMs left from parts, it would be interesting to hear
what versions you have. The numbers on the EPROMs will be something like
1002013-0019 and 1002013-0020 at U65 and U64.
Dave
Joe wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I keep finding a lot of boards made by SMS and I'm wondering if they're worth picking up. A lot of them seem to be out of DEC systems and/or 8" floppy drive controllers that are used with DEC stuff. I usually leave them behind but I picked up one yesterday for parts. this one is a Q-bus card and has an AM2901ADC bit slice CPU, an Intel 8085, an intel 8155 and an Intel 8253. It says that it's model # FWD 0106, Assy # 000420-0001, Fab # 0004222 Rev C.
>
> Any thoughts on this?
>
> Joe
--
David C. Jenner
djenner_at_earthlink.net
Received on Fri Mar 21 2003 - 18:40:01 GMT