Electrician came; PDP-11 works!

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Mon Dec 29 21:41:26 1997

<Err, 'PDP11' covers a whole lot of machines from something like an SBC2
<in a BA11-V (about the size off 2 modern notebooks stacked on top of ea
<other) to a PDP11/70 in a number of 6' racks. There's no 'average'
<machine IMHO

No to mention the PDT series and PRO350/380 series also a s100 board by
marinechip systems.

<There's a whole lot of OS's. Among them are :
<RT11 (single user, a little like CP/M)

RT-11 had four monitors, SJ/single job, FB/forground background,
XM/extended memory and a BM/batch monitor. Later versions (v5.5 or so)
have networking hooks for DECnet, lat and other services.

I run RT-11 on a:

        BDV-11 (11/23A)
        BA11S (11/23B)
        BA11N (J11)
        PDT11/130
        Mongo (a dual by 12 slot rack with 11/23A, 1mb ram, DLV11j,
               BDV11b rom(boot), H780 power)

<RSX-11 (many varients - the forerunner of VMS in many ways)

RSX-11 was the forerunner of VMS. It's realtime capable, multitasking
and can support timsharing as well. DECnet was supported for either
DDCMP or Eithernet networking.

POS

POS was a single user version of RSX-11 with a GUI interface for the
    PRO300 series. It supported a Phone management system, large
    format videodisk and DECnet via serial or Eithernet.
    
<DOS-11 (one user at a time, single tasking?)
<Tripos (Cambidge University's locally-written portable OS)
<Fuzzball (An OS with TCP/IP networking, using many utilities from RT11
<TSX-11 (multi-user OS built on top of RT11)
<Unix (certainly v5, v6, v7 and some BSD's ran on PDP11's)

V7 was supported on the MicroPDP-11 using the J11 (has I&D space) cpu.

<Xenix ? (I've heard rumours of a PDP11 port)

There was also Venix (I have that on a pro350).

<UCSD p-system

Learned Pascal using that on an H-11 varient.

<RSTS/E (never used it, so can't say what it's like)

Resource sharing, timesharing looks like rsx, rt or basic depending on
the monitor running. I have RSTS on DU0: of my system and RT-11 on DU1:
Later versions of RSTS support DECnet networking.

<XXDP+ (diagnostic OS)

Realllllly slooowwww.

Also CTS-300/rt-11 Commercial operating system supporting DIbol which
was a sorta cobol.

DSM-11 a database system with MUMPS as the language

There as CAPS a cassette OS for the TU60 dectape.

Micropower Pascal (host is RT) target is OS less and can be what ever
the applications is.

<There were also some stand-alone programs that didn't need an OS,
<including an assembler and Basic from DEC (which loaded from paper tape
<FIG-forth, a couple of other Forths, etc.

IOX, not an OS but an IO excutive for building custom systems.


Allison
Received on Mon Dec 29 1997 - 21:41:26 GMT

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