[Info-vax] DLT drives and antique SCSI compatibility (was: Re: Next release of OpenVMS x86_)

[Mark DeArman]

On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 23:30:28 -0700 (PDT), Mark DeArman
<s.d.m at ieee.org> wrote:

>On Tuesday, July 14, 2020 at 5:13:02 AM UTC-7, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2020-07-14, Terry Kennedy <terry-... at glaver.org> wrote: 
>> > 
>> > I asked about this when doing the menus - using a second unit 
>> > number to boot VAX code wouldn't have been hard, but I was 
>> > told to just stick to the PDP-11 side. The impression I got 
>> > was that none of the VAX groups wanted it. They were either 
>> > heavily invested in DSSI or already had their own limited- 
>> > function SCSI boards.
>> I wonder if the DEC-specific SCSI hardware will run on any x86-64 
>> box which has a SCSI adapter and I wonder if VSI has provided support 
>> for such devices within x86-64 VMS ? 
>> 
>Certainly not all.  I worked on trying to port some NEFF data acquisition 
>hardware designed for VAX into a Windows environment, at first using 
>Adaptec Narrow SCSI interface cards with the Windows DDK and it was 
>impossible.  We ended up having to use a another piece of COTS 
>differential DIO hardware to interface with the unit.

Probably shouldn't have said Differential there.  Just makes things
confusing.  It was a FPGA based reconfigurable DIO designed for
interfacing to SCSI devices.