Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!us.feeder.erje.net!news2.arglkargh.de!newsfeed.fsmpi.rwth-aachen.de!newsfeed.straub-nv.de!news-1.dfn.de!news.dfn.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Bob Eager Newsgroups: comp.misc,alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: [CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit Date: 24 Apr 2015 00:38:05 GMT Lines: 28 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net 4WnpRFXdDQJUek5sxbsMQAoNXbLq/zaQIyGjM5GkT5MAxIp/d1 Cancel-Lock: sha1:DCt7fb/Ftceka0qa43jYAggu8d0= User-Agent: Pan/0.135 (Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea; GIT 30dc37b master) Xref: csiph.com comp.misc:7493 On Thu, 23 Apr 2015 21:44:08 +0000, RS Wood wrote: > The DEC RL02 drive is the closest you’re going to get to a modern > mechanical hard drive with these old machines. It’s a huge rack unit > with removable platters that can hold 10 Megabytes of storage. [Chris] > found one of these old drives and because he wanted to get into FPGA > development, decided to create a USB adapter for this huge, old drive. > > The hardware isn’t too terribly complex, with a microcontroller and an > FPGA that exposes the contents of the drive over USB mass storage. For > anyone trying to bootstrap a PDP-11 or -8 system, [Chris] could download > disk images from the Internet, write them to the disk, and load up the > contents of the drive from the minicomputer. Now, he’s using it with > SimH[2] to have a physical drive for an emulated system, but the > controller really doesn’t care about what format the disk pack is in. If > [Chris] formatted a disk pack with a FAT file system, > he would have the world’s largest and heaviest USB thumb drive in the > world. Nice. I have two of those drives downstairs here at home! -- Using UNIX since v6 (1975)... Use the BIG mirror service in the UK: http://www.mirrorservice.org