On Apr 14, 2016, at 12:28 PM, Noel Chiappa <j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > >> From: Josh Dersch > >>> They are 12 sector 2315 packs. You have to duplicate it on a two drive >>> Alto, since the format is unique. > >> we're able to duplicate packs and write new ones out from disk images. >> (At the moment it's kind of cumbersome -- involving a PDP-11/44 with a >> 3mbit Ethernet board, a seriously hacked 2.11BSD kernel and a bit of >> luck > > You mean the RK11 controller can write packs that the Alto disk controller > can read? (As in, the low-level format - preamble, sector header, sector > checksum, etc, etc are all identical?) > > Wow, I never knew that - that would have been a useful thing to know BITD - > we had both at MIT (we got the Altos as part of the 3-university Xerox > grant), and although I'm not sure we really needed to be able to transfer > bits from one kind of machine to another, it might have been useful for > something or other. > > We did send a lot of files over the network to an Alto, but it was the Dover > printer spooler machine - using a disk pack for that function wasn't really an > option! :-) > > Noel
Not only that, but we used Diablo Drives on RK05 Controllers. If you had a mix of Diablo and RK05 drives, the order and termination was a bit tricky but it worked.
