so, can you run UNIX on a PDP11/03 or not?

From: Huw Davies <Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au>
Date: Sat Feb 2 07:16:59 2002

At 01:00 AM 31/01/2002 -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
>On January 31, Gunther Schadow wrote:
> > Also, has anybody ever run a VAX11 in PDP mode for real? Sound
> > pretty wild to me to spend so much money only to not use the
> > virtual memory.
>
> The only use of the vax11's pdp11 compatibility mode that I've ever
>heard of was to run RSX-11 binaries under VMS.

In the early days of VMS (say 1.6 through 2.6) there were large parts of
VMS that were "compatibility" mode images. Obvious things like
Datatrieve-11 were there but things like PIP helped users COPY and RENNAME
files. Before BACKUP we used an -11 backup utility whose name escapes me
right now (bit rot in the brain). It's been a long while, but I'm sure
there were lots of other PDP-11 images (ISTR FORTRAN was one of them). We
owe a lot to compatibility mode, otherwise VAX/VMS in the early days
wouldn't have been much use at all. (Yes, I appreciate that this ages me
somewhat, but I was a really _young_ VMS system manager :-)

Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies_at_kerberos.davies.net.au
                      | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
                      | air, the sky would be painted green"
Received on Sat Feb 02 2002 - 07:16:59 GMT