3b1 2nd drive upgrade

[Lenny Tropiano]

In article <1607 at sw1e.UUCP> uusgta at sw1e.UUCP (4237]) writes:
|>Questions, questions, questions.  I been listening for a loong time
|>& got all my whiny questions saved up to spark a flamefest.
|>Here goes:
|>
|>Has someone put together a comprehensive guide to the various 2nd hard disk
|>upgrade alternatives? 
|>
|>Is your 2nd drive board almost ready John? If so, what price did you set? 
...
I think there are only *two* that I know of.  Of course the "ICUS" one,
and John Milton's one.  I am unsure of the John's progression on the premade
boards.  Last I heard (at the Trenton Computer Fest) he had problems with his
PC board supplier not drilling some holes, the clarity of the board labeling,
and some other minor hardware problems.  I am sure he'll eventually sort this 
all out and get the boards made.

|>Is there any hope of ever using the third and forth drives with John's board?
|>
Well without the source to the operating system it looks pretty unlikely.
The changes to the gdisk driver are trivial for additional drives, but
nevertheless there are changes that have to be made.    I don't have $60,000
to shell out for a generic copy of the 3.51 OPSYS (no patches applied) ... :-(

|>Is waiting for a SCSI board reasonable, as in, will it ever happen?
|>Are any companies still interested in producing a SCSI board?
|>
That might be an alternative, but it quite a ways down the road even for beta 
testing.    Again there are probably hooks needed to be made to the operating
system ... Things like system tables like (# of mountable partitions)
will inevitably need to be increased.  (This hopefully will remain increased
in the forthcoming fixdisk to 8, but probably should be raised even higher
if SCSI is to be a reality...)

|>Is Gil & Lenny's upgrade working well for those using it? 
|>
Well I can vouch for myself and Gil.  We've been using our upgrades in 
our UNIX pc's for over 5 months now without any failures.  I've had two
67MB (Miniscribes) on mine (as well as testing a CDC Wren II 80MB (9 heads)
with one of my 67MB Miniscribes (which has worked flawlessly)).  Gil
has had two 40MB Miniscribes on his, again without failure.  We had one
person have some problems (probably with timing [according to Gil]) but
I believe those have been resolved in one way or another...

|>Anyone find a source of 99 pin connectors such as expansion cards use?
|>
Nope, but if you do find someone let us know ;-)   I'm sure if you want to wait
and spend the bucks, AMP will help you.

|>How hard would a "protoboard" and sample driver be to make?
|>
Well without the 99-pin connectors it's a pain.  Soldering 99 wires to
the backplane in a brute-force method (like Gil did) is not my idea of
expandability.  Gil has made "proto" board of sorts, where he has a
board that connects to a solderless-breadboard.  He has done some hardware
testing, as well as, making a EPROM programmer with it.  Depending on how
much smarts you put in your hardware it will depend on how hard the driver 
will be.

...
Not that I know of...
|>
|>Is there a source for the tape controller boards & does the stock 3b2
|>tape drive really work?
|>
Yes it does (obviously the non-SCSI type) I've use ours from the office with
a 3B1 tape controller.  The tape mechanism for both the 3B2 and 3B1 was the 
Cipher model 525 tape drive.

|>Does anyone have a genric PC cartridge drive working using the 2nd
|>floppy approach?
|>
Nope I haven't seen anyone try this ... I'd be interested if anyone want
to take the chance ...

|>A Usenix faceserver to 3b1 bitmap program?
|>
Hmm, I hope someone does.    I started to look at the sunface and xface programs
but that is how far I got.  I just haven't had time to work on it.  Come on!
Someone has to be able to have done this :-) 

|>Does anyone have a hardware manual they'd dispose of?
|>
Not these days, it's a hard item to find!  Glad I got mine a while back ...

-Lenny
-- 
Lenny Tropiano             ICUS Software Systems         [w] +1 (516) 582-5525
lenny at icus.islp.ny.us      Telex; 154232428 ICUS         [h] +1 (516) 968-8576
{talcott,decuac,boulder,hombre,pacbell,sbcs}!icus!lenny  attmail!icus!lenny
        ICUS Software Systems -- PO Box 1; Islip Terrace, NY  11752