The Massbus is a high-performance computer input/output bus designed in the 1970s by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The architecture development was sponsored by Gordon Bell and John Levy was the principal architect.
The bus was used by Digital to interconnect its highest-performance computers with magnetic disk and magnetic tape storage equipment. The use of a common bus was intended to allow a single controller design to handle multiple peripheral models,[1]: 7.0 and allowed the PDP-10, PDP-11, and VAX computer families to share a common set of peripherals. At the time there were multiple operating systems for each of the 16-bit, 32-bit, and 36-bit computer lines. The 18-bit PDP-15/40 connected to Massbus peripherals via a PDP-11 front end. An engineering goal was to reduce the need for a new driver per peripheral per operating system per computer family. Also, a major technical goal was to place any magnetic technology changes (data separators) into the storage device rather than in the CPU-attached controller. Thus the CPU I/O or memory bus to Massbus adapter needed no changes for multiple generations of storage technology.
A business objective was to provide a subsystem entry price well below that of IBM storage subsystems which used large and expensive controllers unique to each storage technology and processor architecture and were optimized for connecting large numbers of storage devices.
The first Massbus device was the RP04, based on Sperry Univac Information Storage Systems's (ISS) clone of the IBM 3330.[2] Subsequently, DEC offered the RP05 and RP06, based on Memorex's 3330 clone. Memorex modified the IBM compatible interface to DEC requirements and moved the data separator electronics into the drive. DEC designed the rest which was mounted in the "bustle" attached to the drive. This set the pattern for future improvements of disk technology to double density 3330, CDC SMD drives, and then "Winchester" technology. Drives were supplied by ISS/Univac, Memorex, and Control Data. Multiple generations of tape technology and performance were also Massbus connected although the architecture was a Master Massbus drive and slave tape drives. DEC also developed the Massbus RS03/04, a head per track disk drive for high performance swapping. The last Massbus disk drive was the DEC designed RM80 as DEC shifted to internal development of large disks.
The RP04 (Figure 1-2) consists of a 733 DEC Disk Storage Drive (manufactured by Information Storage Systems) and a Device Control Logic (DCL) unit (Figure 1-3) (manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation).