Hi,

first, a big "thank you" to all of you who support me with my attempt to get our Explorers and Xerox Stars to run again. I´ll head down to the basement in the afternoon to see if I can build a system that is able to image the Explorer not-quite-SCSI disks (according to the documentation, these have in fact 256 byte sectors).

Btw., this Raspberry Pi SCSI device emulator supposedly also supports emulating SASI drives:
https://hackaday.com/2017/05/01/the-raspberry-pi-becomes-a-scsi-device/

The original Japanese web page linked in the article is no longer online, but there are several versions of the code (and a translated webpage in English) mirrored on github. This might be useful to build a working SCSI device emulation for the Explorer.

So I have another favor related to TI Explorers to ask...

One of the reasons (apart from the planned exhibition) I am interested in Lisp and Smalltalk machines is that I´m collecting information on systems using persistent memory, which could also help my students who work on persistent memory research topics to obtain a better insight into the topic and its history.

There was a research prototype of a persistent virtual memory system for the TI Explorer by Satish M. Tatte (TI Artificial Intelligence Labs) metioned in these papers:

Satish M. Thatte. 1986. Persistent memory: a storage architecture for object-oriented database systems. In Proceedings on the 1986 international workshop on Object-oriented database systems (OODS '86). IEEE Computer Society Press, Washington, DC, USA, 148–159.
(https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/318826.318848)

and

Thatte S.M. (1991) Persistent Memory: A Storage System for Object-Oriented Databases. In: Dittrich K.R., Dayal U., Buchmann A.P. (eds) On Object-Oriented Database Systems. Topics in Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-84374-7_16

The second paper cites a more detailed TI Tech Report which I have been unable to find:

Thatte, S.M.: "Persistent Memory for Symbolic Computers", Technical Report TR-08-85-21, Central Research Laboratories, Texas Instruments Incorporated, Dallas, TX, July 1985.

Does one of you maybe have a copy of this?

Best wishes,
    Michael

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