[Novalug] need dd help

[jecottrell3 at comcast.net]

RP06's were DEC's workhorse during the 70s and 80s. I did a lot of PDP-11 work, and I never saw anything over 20M or 30M until I got to NBS (NIST) in the mid-80s, where 80M and some of our (dozen or so) Vaxen had a few 200M. Around that time, Fujitsu Eagles were the big thing. They were actually a sealed drive, about as big as a filecabinet drawer at 500M. List Price: $20K...or $14K for .EDU/.GOV

Yes, those disks used a proprietary protocol, but back then, DEC was the King of Minicomputers...and the Massbus Spec later became the SMD Standard.

Vax memory boards were about as big as a motherboard, 1M, and cost about $1K in the 80s.

BTW, I was at UMD when we got the first PDP-11s in 1974, an 11/40 and later an 11/45 with RK05 "cartridges"...a one platter disk that held about 2.5M.

Oh yeah...and one of my professors was David L. "NTP" Mills.

JIM

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Beals" <andrew.beals at gmail.com>
To: mark at winksmith.com
Cc: novalug at calypso.tux.org
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2012 5:36:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Novalug] need dd help





On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Mark Smith < mark at winksmith.com > wrote: 



On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 06:33:21PM -0500, Nino R. Pereira wrote: 
> The disks themselves make great mirrors, 

I have an old one lying around somewhere that came from an old DEC 
washing machine sized disk drive (RP04?). The platter is about 18" wide. 
All the platter together formed a whole 512MB iirc. Hard to imagine so 
much hardware to read/write that little data. IIRC, the DEC proprietary 
bus they used had a whole block worth of wires in a bundle the size of 
my wrist, but I'm really taxing my memory for 80's information. 

I seem to recall it looking similar to this: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pack 

Only bigger and about 5 times as tall, but perhaps I was smaller then 
so it's just an optical illusion. 

Apologies for the side trip down memory lane. 



You're probably thinking of the RP06 or maybe the RP04. 

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/rp06.html 

A whole 178MB! 

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/rp04.html 

92MB! 

Man, we never filled whichever one of those we had two of at Maryland. 


More pictures here: 

http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hardware/disks-1981.html 






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