[Simh] Dec-10 Day announcement from Living Computers: Museum + Labs

[Rich Alderson]

> From: Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se>
> Date: Sun, 10 Dec 2017 11:12:45 +0100

> Rich. This is a nice thing. Thanks.

Thanks, Johnny.

> I have one question/wish, though.

> I don't know if you were aware of a device called the RM06. This was a 
> Massbus disk created by Shelby, which was varible size.

I am not familiar with the RM06, which was not supported under Tops-10 or
TOPS-20.  The MDE started out as a replacement for the RP06 drives on our
DEC-1080 (replaced by the DEC-2065 on which we offer on-line accounts).
Because other operating systems for the PDP-10+Massbus only supported
the RP06 or RM03, we did not look beyond those for our own needs.

I was disappointed to learn that the RM05 was never supported, either.

> It would be a really nice thing to emulate. I can probably reverse 
> engineer it from the RSX driver, and I don't know which systems ever 
> supported it. RSX for sure. Possibly also RSTS/E, but beyond that is 
> more uncertain. Most people and systems had moved on from Massbus before 
> this drive came out.

> But it is a much nicer solution than emulating eight RP06 drives, when 
> you have some big disk in the backend.

Not if the OS doesn't support the big disk.

> Do you know what speeds this emulated massbus disk can achieve, by the way?

Fast enough to supply 8 RP07s on a KL-10 based Dec-10.  We haven't done any
serious benchmarking; it's good enough for our needs.

                                                                Rich