ThisPostContainsComputers
Experienced Member
Well, today I have finally managed to get my hands on some "larger" PDP-11 hardware. The ad I picked it up from was originally was originally only for the drives, but a system unit, rack, media, and cabling ended up being included to. All in all I ended up driving home with:
Anyway, moving on to the main chassis. On the front panel it states that it is a "ADAC System 1000", with a number of ADAC branded cards inside. On the topic of cards, this machine is packed full of them. Most of the cards have been loosely thrown into the backplane, and are not actually plugged in. Most of the cards are fairly straight forward, thought I think some have them may not be front the original set up of this machine, and instead just thrown in there when the machine was sold as surplus. There are multiple M8047 cards, plus multiple RAM cards (3rd party 128K, and a M8044). I am assuming the ADAC cards are just Digital<->Analog cards. Also included is a MLSI-512 graphics card.
The guy I got it from says he bought it as surplus from the University of Minnesota. Pretty sure it was for data collection and logging, like many systems of this configuration are. I will probably have more questions once I start unloading the rest of the hardware tomorrow, but for now I do have a couple. First off, how do you actually open the RL0X drives. I was going to open them up in order to lock the heads before moving them, but wasn't quite able to figure it out on site. There appears to be what I think is a latch on the top, but I am assuming they are electromechanically locked. I am also curious on to what the order of operation for getting these RL0X drives fully checked out before trying to use them is? Wouldn't want to wreak my limited supply of disks now would I?
Thank you, Gavin
- A 3rd party chassis packed full with an M8186 CPU, assorted DEC cards, and a number of 3rd party cards.
- 1 RX02
- 1 RL01
- 1 RL02
- Assorted 8" floppy disks, 2 RL02 disks, 1 RL01 disk
- DEC branded rack
- Most (all?) of the needed cabling
Anyway, moving on to the main chassis. On the front panel it states that it is a "ADAC System 1000", with a number of ADAC branded cards inside. On the topic of cards, this machine is packed full of them. Most of the cards have been loosely thrown into the backplane, and are not actually plugged in. Most of the cards are fairly straight forward, thought I think some have them may not be front the original set up of this machine, and instead just thrown in there when the machine was sold as surplus. There are multiple M8047 cards, plus multiple RAM cards (3rd party 128K, and a M8044). I am assuming the ADAC cards are just Digital<->Analog cards. Also included is a MLSI-512 graphics card.
The guy I got it from says he bought it as surplus from the University of Minnesota. Pretty sure it was for data collection and logging, like many systems of this configuration are. I will probably have more questions once I start unloading the rest of the hardware tomorrow, but for now I do have a couple. First off, how do you actually open the RL0X drives. I was going to open them up in order to lock the heads before moving them, but wasn't quite able to figure it out on site. There appears to be what I think is a latch on the top, but I am assuming they are electromechanically locked. I am also curious on to what the order of operation for getting these RL0X drives fully checked out before trying to use them is? Wouldn't want to wreak my limited supply of disks now would I?
Thank you, Gavin
