rx01 w/o controller board

[Allison]

>Subject: Re: rx01 w/o controller board
>   From: Brad Parker <brad at heeltoe.com>
>
>
>Allison wrote:
>>
>>Brad did you buy a bare drive?
>
>yes, apparently I did :-)
>
>>If so you need the cab, power supply and both logic cards.
>
>So, it seems I need the 2 logic cards.  All that for a floppy :-)
>
>thanks!

Well err, yes!  DEC did things a bit different as the RX01 dates
to before the era of FDC chips.  So what they did was encapsulate 
both the drive electronics and a full floppy data interface into 
the system.  By doing that they also simplified stuff by way of 
consolidation that was both expensive at the time and power hungry.

What that amounts to is the RX01 box is two dives and the interface
and all that's needed in the system is a fancy {but cheap to design 
and build} parallel port to interface it to the bus. Very handy as 
the RX01 could be used with PDP-8, PDP11 both Unibus and Q-bus.
As a result a nominal Sa800 drive is not even a close analoge to 
the complete RX01.

So having the bare drive is like buying a car, well ok, the frame 
and transmission for one. 

Generally RX01 and RX02 drives sans the bus interface card are 
not hard to find.  Don't ship it though, they weigh in around 50+
pounds!  Whats a good replacement is DSD880s, those are RX01/02
work alike boxes that are a contoller, floppy and some models 
include a hard disk from 10 to 30mb in one case 6" high.  Even 
then you need both the complete box and the bus interface card 
to match.



Allison