RT-11 - An Open letter to Mentec?

From: Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com>
Date: Tue Apr 17 09:29:58 2001

>Daniel T. Burrows wrote:

> I am actively involved in the hobby program with Mentec. ( I even managed
> to drag a couple other members of the list into it) The RT11 release is
> just waiting for one last update for something that will be on the CD. All
> of this probably would have been completed over a month ago but I had a
> major fire that destroyed my office and storage buildings at the end of
> January. ( You don't even want to know the amount of DEC equipment and docs
> that were destroyed - over 3000 sq. feet of tightly packed racks and
> shelves) this ranged from 11/40, 11/04 through 11/93's, M90's, M100's,
> numerous VAX's up to and including a couple 4705A's.
> Needless to say this has put me WAY behind financially and with the regular
> customers I support.

Jerome Fine replies:

I am sad to hear about this, especially for you personally as well as for the
business loss. Is there any hardware that you need but now can't get?
Are there any RT-11 problems that I could help with? Sorry - I would
not be of any help with RSX/RSTS/VMS.

Can you at least describe the overall probable contents of the CD and
also tell us if the contents are based on availability or because Mentec
did not want the omitted distributions on the CD? Namely, if the omitted
items became "available", could they be included? While the actual
distribution versions would be the best indication, a simple statement
that there will be RT-11 distributions would help as well. And are
the layered products being considered like FORTRAN and BASIC?

Also, will the CD be set up as Tim Shoppa set up the RT-11 Freeware CD
with DOS/W95/W98 files at the beginning and RT-11 partitions with
duplicates at the end? Or all DOS or all RT-11. Note that for DOS,
the first 64 blocks of partition zero in RT-11 are not available with the
raw SCSI media. With the RT-11 Freeware CD from Tim Shoppa,
this is not a problem, but could be if ONLY RT-11 partitions are
on the CD. For example, PUTR from John Wilson probably can't
read the first 64 blocks of partition zero under DOS if it had been
an RT-11 partition. Note that there are a number of ways around
this problem under DOS, but they are unnecessary if RT-11 partition
zero is devoted to DOS files.

> I will be announcing it here when it is official but in the meantime please
> go easy on Mentec. It ends up trickling back to me and I am doing as much
> as I can, when I can.
> RSX and RSTS will follow as my time ( and the others involved) permits.

Hopefully, this was not the trickle situation and these posts on classiccmp
are the best way and do not involve Mentec in any manner.

Can you use any help? Have you a new target date at this point? Any
information would be helpful since probably most of us were not aware
it was even being considered. In fact, can you take a few minutes and
describe what is being considered?

I would certainly be willing to help with anything that I could do at my end.
I have both real PDP-11 Qbus hardware available with a SCSI host adapter
with both SCSI hard drives and Sony SMO S501 magneto optical drives
and a number of 5 1/4" disks which hold about 295 MBytes per side
(about 8.75 RT-11 partitions). I also have available a PC which can
run RT-11 under the Supnik emulator along with PUTR from John Wilson.

If you want to talk by phone on Sunday when rates are less expensive,
send me you number and I will call you. That applies to anyone else
as well.

> Also don't expect them to be willing to put any time or effort into support
> of hobby users. If you want support then you need to be a real commercial
> paying $$ customer that pays for the consulting time like many of us here
> get paid that are consultants.

By definition, this is obvious. But I agree that some hobby users do not understand
the situation, so it needs to be made very explicit.

On the other hand, most of the time, there is help available from this list for
the hobby users that need it.

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
Received on Tue Apr 17 2001 - 09:29:58 BST