SMD (was Re: All things ESDI)

[Bjørn Vermo]

On Fri, 06 May 2005 10:10:38 +0200, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On 5/5/05, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > The ESDI interface was sort-of like a slightly scaled down SMD  
>> interface.
>>
>> SMD?
>
> SMD was another drive interface of 20-something years ago

I think we used SMD-drives on our kongsberg SM-4 and KS-500 minicomputers  
as early as 1976, but I am not quite certain. The drives in question were  
top-loaders with 5-disk Memorex diskpacks. Stored something like 40MB.

...
>
> SMD drives were uncommon for PC-class hardware, but were quite common
> for minicomputers, especially in the PDP-11 and VAX worlds where
> people didn't want to pay DEC's prices for DEC's disks.

I have a couple of Nestar fileservers with 120MB Priam 14" drives. That is  
probably as close as you get to PCs using SMD - the diskless PCs booted  
off the fileserver.

Does anybody know the bus specs for the Nestar servers? They were not  
willing to give out any detailed hardware information, and their software  
developer kit was way too expensive. The operating system was Merlin (not  
the OS/2 version, this was mid-1980's, something vaguely Unix-like on the  
surface of it) running on a 6800 processor.

-- 
Bjørn