Rk8e/Rk8l Data Reliability Program

Summary

This document provides the operational guide for the RK8E/RK8L Data Reliability Program, a diagnostic tool released by Digital Equipment Corporation in February 1977.

Core Purpose: The program is designed primarily as an acceptance test to verify data transfer integrity within disk systems. It features two main modes:

• Acceptance Mode: Automates the verification of large volumes of data (transferring 3 x 10^9 bits) to and from each disk drive.
• Manual Intervention Mode: Provides a hardware debugging aid allowing users to customize data patterns, transfer lengths, and addressing.

Requirements & Operations:

• System Compatibility: Designed for PDP-8/A, 8/E, 8/F, or 8/M computers.
• Prerequisites: Requires a formatted cartridge on all drives and necessitates that basic/extended memory diagnostics be run prior to this program.
• Execution: A full acceptance pass takes approximately 4 hours per drive on a 4K system, or 3.5 hours on systems with extended memory.
• Configuration: The document details specific Switch Register (SWR) settings for loop control, error handling, and reporting, as well as instructions for loading and running the program via the standard binary loader technique.