lm@cottage.WISC.EDU (Larry McVoy) (06/21/87)
Hi. This article is directed towards anyone that has done extensive hacking on
the PC7300. If you know such a person please forward this article to them.
Could someone please forward this to the PC7300 network? Thanks. Oh, yeah,
if it gets that far: Gary Smith: send me your address, you turkey. :-)
I'm thinking about buying one of these machines (my house mate has one)
and I have a few questions.
1) Has anyone out there successfully created and installed a loadable driver?
I'd love to see the code. Even something that just stumbles. If anyone
has gotten the documentation that is said to be available from at&t I'd
pay $$$ for that (AT&T doesn't answer my letters).
The goal for getting such a driver is to create a ram disk (/tmp).
2) I don't feel like paying the big bucks for a tape unit. Has anyone
looked at the interface for the floppy to see if it can pretend to be
a tape drive? A lot of PC tape drives talk to the floppy controller.
Maybe it's the same thing.
How about a tape unit that talks to the serial or parallel port? Do
such things exist? Someone said that 3m makes such a beast.
3) Crystal. Has anyone been brave enough to put in a faster crystal to
crank up the clock speed? I'd like to hear how it went even if it
didn't work.
4) Drives - has anyone looked at bringing out the drive select lines from
the WE disk controller? Yeah, I know, you'd need another driver.
5) Technical manuals. Has anyone bought the reference manual from AT&T
or convergent? I'm interested in doing a 4.3 port (yeah, I'm sorta
qualified to do that) but I'm not about to tackle it if I have to
disassemble the kernel. I need info on the MMU, and the I/O devices
mainly.
Thanks for any light you may throw on these questions. I'll summarize if
there is interest.
Larry McVoy lm@cottage.wisc.edu or u#!kes noMic