[Simh] PDP10 RP06 parameters
Bob Supnik
bob at supnik.org
Mon Apr 13 08:20:13 EDT 2015
Your original calculation is correct. There are 815 cylinders, 19 heads,
20 sectors, and in the simulator, the sectors are 128 64b words (or 1024
bytes).
The the reason for the discrepancy is simple: the last five tracks
haven't been written by software. SimH data files are only as long as
the data written; the rest is assumed to be zero.
On the PDP11, disk files for older disks usually get extended to full
length by writing a "bad block" table at the end as part of
initialization. The PDP10 didn't follow this practice. It used
differently formatted disk packs, to cope with the 36b/32b word size
difference.
/Bob
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