> DEC controllers and DEC 8" drives cannot. Not for any platform. > > Back in the day, DEC floppy users purchased pre-formatted floppies. > If you had an RX02, you could "INIT" an RX01 floppy to RX02 use - > essentially just rewriting the data portion of the sector to > double-density (256 bytes per sector) and I _think_ it's possible to > put it back.
Then I guess the question rattling around my brain is "How did I get this Elephant Memory systems disk formatted?" I know I didn't have an RX02 at the time, and I know DEC didn't do it for me as a favor. I know I bought a box of ten of them because I stuck the Elephant Memory Systems sticker on the front of my RM02 for good luck (I wonder where that drive is these days....) I thought that is why I kept the PDT11 around.
I do have a card around here called an RXV21 from Plessy or something like that, maybe it could talk to an RX01 drive and format the disks?
Darn brain, there's a hole in it somewhere around this seemingly not-interesting fact. The disk though is still here, and is formatted RX01 with programs I wrote to it 30 years ago.
I did have an H11 computer, but it did not have the H27 disk drive, or at least I have no memory of owning one after looking at that one on Ebay.
In a practical sense, I really don't need to format anything anymore: The best use for the RX01 is to bootstrap BRUSYS so I can backup the EDSI disk with the TK50. Reading old disks is nice, but the first thing I do is create a .DSK image of them on a real disk. In theory it is handy to have a small capacity disk to do image transfers from SIMH using the PDP11GUI but now that I have Kermit up I can just transfer stuff that way....
Anyone want a pile of old RX02 formatted disks? I'll trade them for a few RX01 floppies just to have and to make PD: bootable disks for all the MiniMINCs out there.
Back in the day, DEC floppy users purchased pre-formatted floppies. If you had an RX02, you could "INIT" an RX01 floppy to RX02 use - essentially just rewriting the data portion of the sector to double-density (256 bytes per sector) and I _think_ it's possible to put it back.
Hm. Well at least that makes disk alignments a lot simpler: If all the disks were originally formatted at DEC then interchange is pretty much guaranteed.
Ah DEC. Always wanted to get that last nickel from their user base. CZ
