My Collection

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Fri Apr 13 10:12:34 2001

>Marian Capel wrote:

> PDP8/F with TU56 and DSD440
> PDP8/A with TU56 and RL01
> VT100, hacked about to contain an 11/23, with external ST412, runs RX11.
> Anybody has some RT11 manuals available.
> Jos Dreesen

Jerome Fine replies:

Interesting collection. I had not realized that DSD made a controller for the
PDP8, just for the PDP-11. Also I am really surprised that DEC made
an RL01 controller for the PDP8.

AS for your VT100, it sounds like you might have a VT103 which was a standard
DEC product. Does it use a dual 11/23 but have added a 3rd party MFM controller
with its own boot ROM or are you using a quad 11/23 and an RQDX1?

In my case, I used a Sigma RQD11-B controller that I borrowed for a while
(too expensive at the time) with a dual 11/23, M8059 memory (1/4 MByte)
and a DLV11-J. The ST412 was placed INSIDE the VT100 under the tube.
Later, the backplane was upgraded to 22 bits, a 4 MByte memory substituted
along with a dual 11/73 and a Sigma RQD11-EC ESDI controller. In this
case, the drives were outside running on a PC power supply. A DHV11
was also added. This system was only used as a demo a few times since
the power consumption of the 5 boards was too high for the VT103 to
take a chance. But having 10 others terminals and a printer hanging off the
VT103 and 2.4 GBytes of disk space in the back was rather impressive
just for the fun of the experiment.

By the way, all this was running RT-11/TSX-PLUS. I have a friend who
may be getting rid of his PDP-11 systems and there are probably some
RT-11 manuals. But they are heavy. The shipping would be expensive.
And he may want some payment, especially for the SCSI host adapter -
Peter Turnbull are you interested?

Also, I am not surprised, but no one seems to consider software as part
of their collection. Is it because they are mostly copies that have been
"acquired" or because software is not really considered collectable by
most list participants? From my point of view, the software is far more
important since eventually (100 years?, 200 years?) the hardware will
not be able to be repaired, but the software should always be able to
run under an emulator. For the PDP-11, I use the emulator 90% of
the time at this point since I don't need to switch systems plus the emulator
runs 3 times as fast as the actual DEC 11/83 hardware even under a
Pentium 166 MMX. When I finally upgrade the PC to a 1 GHz system
in a few years (assuming that I can still run W95/W98), the difference
will be even greater.

Does anyone on the list run RT-11 still other than Megan Gentry?
Do you tinker with the operating system code at all? Does anyone
care about the RT-11 Operating System?

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Fri Apr 13 2001 - 10:12:34 BST