PDP-11: Disk over Serial proposal

[Robin Birch]

This shouldn't be a problem.  Thinking from a 2.11 point of view, if
something that could load the standalone kernel was written and an
additional deveice driver included that would talk over the serial line
once the standalone stuff was up you could treat the PC, or whatever, as
a tape drive.  Whilst this doesn't give all the frills of full disc
access it has a couple of good thigs to it:

1)  The only stuff that has to be loaded over the serial line without
the benefit of lots of code that can do error checking is the initial
standalone loader.

2)  The standalone loader can then treat the serial port as a tape drive
which is a relatively simple process as far as the loader is concerned
and so you would only need a driver that looked like a TS11 (say) but
talked to a serial port.

3)  The PC end would then just have a simple prog that would treat the
files on the PC as tape files which would make shipping stuff around
easy as we could then do this as dump or tar forms which could be just
ftp'd etc from archives.

It would be slow but it would get things going quite simply.

Ideas + comments please?

Robin
Robin Birch     robin at falstaf.demon.co.uk

M1ASU           Old computers and radios always welcome

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