Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]
| From | RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> |
|---|---|
| Newsgroups | comp.misc, alt.folklore.computers |
| Subject | [CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit |
| Date | 2015-04-23 21:44 +0000 |
| Organization | solani.org |
| Message-ID | <mhbp38$fdq$1@solani.org> (permalink) |
Cross-posted to 2 groups.
From the «now I need bigger pants pockets» department: Title: VCF East X: The World’s Largest USB Thumb Drive Author: Brian Benchoff Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 16:00:52 -0400 Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/hackaday/LgoM/~3/0pCxN9YK7BA/ Podcast Download URL: http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/cfdb118f461bac921cec1c793b76837e?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2F0.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96 The Vintage Computer Festival last weekend featured racks and racks of old minicomputers, enough terminals for an entire lab, and enough ancient storage devices to save a YouTube video. These storage devices – hard disks, tape readers, and 8″ disk drives – were only connected to vintage hardware, with one exception: a DEC RL02 drive connected to a modern laptop via USB[1]. 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. Video below. Filed under: classic hacks[3], cons[4], FPGA[5][image 6][image 7][image 8] Links: [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T72HBhSATHY&feature=youtu.be (link) [2]: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ (link) [3]: http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/hackadaycom.wordpress.com/153237/ (link) [4]: http://hackaday.com/category/cons/ (link) [5]: http://hackaday.com/category/fpga-2/ (link) [6]: http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/hackadaycom.wordpress.com/153237/ (image) [7]: http://pixel.wp.com/b.gif?host=hackaday.com&blog=4779443&post=153237&subd=hackadaycom&ref=&feed=1 (image) [8]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/hackaday/LgoM/~4/0pCxN9YK7BA (image) -- Posting to comp.misc, sci.misc, and misc.news.internet.discuss
Back to comp.misc | Previous | Next — Next in thread | Find similar
[CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2015-04-23 21:44 +0000 Re: [CM] the world's largest USB thumbdrive: a DEC RL02 drive retrofit Bob Eager <news0005@eager.cx> - 2015-04-24 00:38 +0000
csiph-web