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Mystery Machine

Sorry for the late reaction, but we already have
Werner said:
Hi Adriaan,
I do have the aim to get the system to people who have a real interest for it.
So I would be honoured to hand it to your collection (for free!)
We just need to find a way how to get it to your place
best regards Werner
Click to expand...
I’m sorry for the late reaction, but we already have a complete system with emulator and programmer, but thank you!
 
I do have a mystery machine of which I’m trying to get info about.
Maybe a good candidate for this thread 🤔 of which I’m not sure if they belong together originally…
 

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The front panel controls are typical of a DEC PDP-11 Qbus system. The 8" floppy drives may be emulating a DEC RX02 (or RX01). What's inside the main chassis?

Tape drive likely has a PERTEC interface and there were a variety of third-party Qbus controllers for PERTEC-interface tape drives that emulated one of several DEC tape drive interface.
 
The DSD floppy is a replacement for DEC's RX01/02 and has the additional advantage that it is capabnle of formatting the floppies. The DEC ones can't...
I also used a DSD drive to directly image DEC floppies on a MSDOS system, bnoth RX01 and RX02 format.
 
pbirkel@gmail.com said:
The front panel controls are typical of a DEC PDP-11 Qbus system. The 8" floppy drives may be emulating a DEC RX02 (or RX01). What's inside the main chassis?

Tape drive likely has a PERTEC interface and there were a variety of third-party Qbus controllers for PERTEC-interface tape drives that emulated one of several DEC tape drive interface.
Click to expand...
I just learned that the computer came from another party as the tape drive, so they never worked together. Maybe they will someday.
At the bottom of the cabinet sits a keyboard, it’s missing some keys and I don’t know where it’s from or what it is (yet…).
 
pbirkel@gmail.com said:
The front panel controls are typical of a DEC PDP-11 Qbus system. The 8" floppy drives may be emulating a DEC RX02 (or RX01). What's inside the main chassis?

Tape drive likely has a PERTEC interface and there were a variety of third-party Qbus controllers for PERTEC-interface tape drives that emulated one of several DEC tape drive interface.
Click to expand...
Here are some pictures...
 

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DSD floppy interface, two MDB DL11 serial port cards, a Plessey memory board, and an 11/03 CPU
Pity that the nice big box only has a four slot backplane in it
 
To be honest, I was very disappointed how empty this huge box was...
Now I have to figure out how to remove the power supply in order to examen and maybe recap it.
If someone has a receipe, link or pdf how to do this? Please let me know.
 
Al Kossow said:
DSD floppy interface, two MDB DL11 serial port cards, a Plessey memory board, and an 11/03 CPU
Pity that the nice big box only has a four slot backplane in it
Click to expand...
Note that one of the MDB DL11 has been modified with a relay and some other stuff. Perhaps that was intended as a RDR RUN control for a Teletype? Not sure how you'd modify any DL11-type controller for that ...

Also note that there's no controller for the Data Systems Design dual floppy drives. At least those controllers still seem to be floating around whereas the DSD drives tend to have disappeared :-<.

Interesting that the backplane is a 6-slot unit yet apparently was wired as a Qbus in the first four slots. I have a vague recollection that a third-party did sell a configuration like that; perhaps it was ACT/ABLE with one of their Unibus-to-Qbus bridges.
Adriaan said:
To be honest, I was very disappointed how empty this huge box was...
Click to expand...
Well, on the upside you could install any of a number of Unibus backplanes there and host a bigger-badder CPU, although that's dependent on the capabilities of your power supply. Do you have any photos of it? I don't recall seeing any documentation for that chassis. Perhaps Al has?
 
I don't have pictures of the power supply, I still need some quality time with it, but first I need to figuren out how to remove it from the frame.
Concering the chassis itself: at first I didn't recognize what it was, because it has this sign on the front panel:
20240925_160904.jpg
But I noticed a little piece of blue of the original patch.
 
No idea....
The cables were dangling from the back of the cabinet. Inside the cabinet sits a dual drive.
I am at the university only once a week as a volunteer technician, being retired.
So I report back next wednesday.
 
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