Acorn Econet Fileserver

[Pete Turnbull]

On Nov 20 2005, 18:29, Tony Duell wrote:

> > I forget whether it's the mark that's longer than the space, or the
> > other way round, but in essence the longer interval gives the
hardware
>
> Ah, does the TX output change on one edge of the clock and the Rx
input
> sample on the opposite edge, or something?

Something like that.  I forget the details.

> The E20 hard disk unit contains the standard Host Adapter card linked
to
> a 20NByte SCSI hard disk. That was the normal thing to link to the 34
pin
> connector on the E01. It sohuld be relatively easy to put one of
those
> together... Is there any restriction on the hard disk size? What
would
> happen if I linked up a unit of several hundred Mbyte capacity? Would
it
> just not work, would it only see it as a 20Mhyte unit, or would it
see
> the whole thing?

There will be some limit, but I'm not sure what it is.  More than 20MB,
for sure.  Might be 500MB, maybe less.  I know that stacking filestores
use the same code, and I know that although the largest ones sold and
supported by Acorn were 60MB, they had bigger in-house.

> Accordign to the manual, there is a utility disk for this unit, and
maybe
> a service disk too (it's not clear whether this is one disk or two).
The
> former contained the program to format the winchester, and is
therefore
> somewhat importent.

Yes, two 3.5" floppies.  And I just happen to have a set :-)  One is
for use with a Master 128 called "M128-FSUTILS" and the other is for
use with a Compact and labelled "COMPACT-FSUTILS".

They're 640K, like ADFS L format, but the actual disk directory etc is
somewhat different, and called "Filestore Format".  So I can copy them
for you if you send me a couple of 3.5" DD floppies.  I've never tried
making a teledisk image; that *might* work.  They're double-density,
256 bytes/sector, 16 sectors/track.

Once upon a time I made a couple of normal ADFS copies, so I can see
that the content seems to be most (all?) of the Master Series Welcome
disk, plus the normal Econet library programs, the utilities that come
with Level 3 for copying between filing systems and cataloging multiple
directories, Level 3 library programs like the formatter,
backup/restore, netmonitor, etc, some updated 1770 DFS ROM images,
printer drivers, etc.

> The latter ran on a BBC Master and contained various
> test programs. There was a special test box for Econet testing that
> plugged into the econet ports on the Master and on the
unit-under-test
> (here, the Filestore), and could source a clock and simulate a
> poor-quality line, both contrlled by lines on the user port.
Amazingly I
> have this test box, I don't have the software.

Ditto!  The test box pre-dates the Master series, though.  It was
around when Beebs were.

> The chap who sold this to me included a couple of such Sony
> drives, alas missing the front panels and eject buttons. I now have
to
> try to find those. The missing mounting hardware is less of a
problem,
> as are the missing cables.

Those probably came from a Master Compact or an Archimedes -- they used
the drives without the bezels.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Network Manager
						University of York