Acorn Econet Fileserver

[Jules Richardson]

Tony Duell wrote:
>> I'd forgotten about that; in ADFS-land, ADFS knew nothing about device IDs - 
>> everything was ID 0 and so the host adapter could still only have one device 
> 
> How stupid!  I wonder why they did that (after all, they allowed for 
> multiple floppy drives on the same controller). It's almsot as stupid as 
> POS haeving 2 storage devices (one floppy, one winchester) hard-coded 
> into the OS.

Isn't SASI just single target though? (I'd forgotten this, I was thinking that 
it was multiple target like SCSI just without all the device reservation like 
SCSI)

So if the board (despite Acorn calling it SCSI) is really just SASI (or maybe 
if it started life as a SASI project) then it could explain why the software 
never addressed more than one target device.

Either that or Acorn were rather short-sighted in their software, but they 
weren't normally known for this (typically, if the hardware would do it they 
seemed to think that someone would actually want to do it).

Maybe it comes down to code size and there just wasn't the room in the ADFS 
ROM for the device selection code (assuming that Acorn's board contains the 
necessary SCSI features anyway - I think you likely need /ATN to do device 
selection?)

>> connected up to it. Maybe that was fixed for the Filestore's firmware though, 
>> as it always seemed like a silly omission.
> 
> According to the docs, the E01S (with the host adapter on the mainboard) 
> supported up to 4 SCSI drives. Now, the ROM is different between the E01 
> and E01S (if only because the former has a pair of 27256s, the latter a 
> single 27512)

You made me realise that I need to archive the ROMs from the E01 I have in the 
cupboard - I've only got E01S ROM dumps on this 'ere PC (at least they're 
512Kbit).  I've never had an E01S, but I do get stray ROMs amongst Acorn finds 
occasionally, which is where these will have come from. Incidentally I have a 
"Version A" ROM and a "Version 1" ROM; why Acorn named one with a letter and 
one with a number I don't know (they are different in content)

cheers

Jules