PDP 11/73 is ALIVE!

From: Ian Primus <ian_primus_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sun Nov 23 13:40:38 2003

On Sunday, November 23, 2003, at 02:18 PM, John Allain wrote:

>> From what I have been able to tell, in the PDP-11, the
>> order of the cards matters, and their addresses need
>> to be set manually, right? How to do this, I'm not sure.
>
> Wasn't this system preconfigured when you got it?
> That would say to me that it was likely already 90-99%
> ready.
> At any rate it will be useful to record the card and slot
> location info for your system for later.

Well, yes and no. The machine had a CPU card, serial card and RAM in
it, but nothing else. And I didn't know how the serial card was
configured. Now I have figured out how the serial card works, but I am
trying to get the machine to boot off tape. I haven't even begun to
think about hooking up the hard drive yet.

>
>> I don't know for sure that I have the tape drive connected
>> right though.
>
> The cables are labelled P1 and P2. Locate the pin 1 point
> on the source, cable and destination and line 'em all up,
> once for each cable.

I'm assuming that P1 and P2 would go to J1 and J2 respectively, right?
That's what I don't know. I've got pin 1's matched up, but I don't know
for sure if the tape controller and tape drive have their connectors
numbered the same way. With my luck, they won't be...

>> Here is the boot program I'm trying to use:
>
> Might be useful but more likely with this system is that it
> would boot by loading just one address first, just my hunch
> for now.
>
Yeah, you're probably right. I'll have to look at the hardware some
more and post more information.

Ian Primus
ian_primus_at_yahoo.com
Received on Sun Nov 23 2003 - 13:40:38 GMT