Isn't there still at least one ABLE ENABLE board out there extant that
could be used to read the PROMs?
Or is the actual original programming info itself needed to duplicate?
On Thu, Oct 25, 2018 at 6:56 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
From: Jacob
Ritorto
If this is true, I wonder why the install only
offers rl01?
Where does it say this? (I didn't search for that.)
I'm totally in the market for an Able Enable
board too! Out of
zcuriosity, is it totally out of the question to just find the prints
and do a production run?
Rotsa ruck! They're down the same mine as Jimmy Hoffa!! :-)
But seriously, if you could find them, that would be fantastic. I've
managed
to collect (thanks Clem!) a tiny bit of info about them:
http://gunkies.org/wiki/Able_ENABLE
and I _think_ I've worked out how they worked, but more is better. We had a
set of the prints at MIT BITD, but we didn't have the PROM/PLA/PAL/etc
programming info, and one would need that too to reproduce them.
I sure hope there's a pdp11 sdcard / usb
disk solution someday like
they
did for the Commodore 64
So Dave Bridgham and I have been working on a QBUS card with an FPGA that
uses
an SD card to hold the bits, and emulates an RK11/RP11/etc controller. We
have
a wire-wrap prototype working (the RK11's done, the RP11 should be a short
edit of that), and UNIX boots and runs. Now to turn it into PCB's...
We've planned that the next step will be to do a UNIBUS version, which will
also include ENABLE functionality (although it won't be plug compatible
with
an ENABLE, the memory will be on-board).
Now to find the time/energy to make it happen... :-(
Noel