In 1979, the Dutch team of Harry Whitfield’s students writing the Groningen University Time Sharing O/S called GUTS sent an RK05 to Edinburgh for us to try out on a PDP11/60 we had access to in Steven Salter’s Wavepower project lab. Ian Young spun it up and learned how to use it. After some years of being out on loan, we hope to have the disk pack returned to us this year, so I’m now looking for someone reliable who can recover very old disk packs, preferably in the USA where we can ship the pack to them, without having to go through customs and risk damage in an inspection (I remember those scary 1970’s diagrams showing the comparative size of a smoke particle next to the gap between the heads and the disk surface!). To minimize the risk of damage during shipping, I’m hoping that the person who currently has it can ship it directly to whomever we can find who can read it for us, rather than to me and then to that person.
I’ll be happy with a raw disk read, but the GUTS file format should be backwards compatible with RT11 files so if the disk is readable I don’t think we’ll have trouble getting the data off, especially if the person with a pdp11 runs RT11 on it. If we can get a disk image however I think we could get it running again under emulation.
Please contact me at [email protected] if you know of anyone in the US who might be able to read this disk pack, or contact them and ask them to contact me if they’re interested.
Thanks,
Graham [email protected]
PS We have the 3 GUTS manuals in pdf format, but that’s the only GUTS documentation that we know of which survived: