>Ron Hudson wrote:
> Were there any PDP11's as small as the DECmate III?
Jerome Fine replies:
I asked this question at the bottom of one of my replies,
but it seems that it has not been addressed at all.
I presume that even a DECmate III requires a user
interface (normally called a terminal / monitor+keyboard)
to be useful!
Based on that assumption, may the user interface be
considered as a separate piece of hardware?
(a) If the answer is yes, then can it also be assumed
that anything placed inside the terminal does NOT
add to the overall size?
(b) If the answer is NO, then can it be assumed that
the total combination of (terminal + DECmate III) is
the actual size to be compared?
Until the above assumptions can be clarified, there
is no point is trying to decide what is the smallest
PDP-11. I still contend that is likely to be the VT103,
but the VT103 might well be larger than a very small
laptop or other device used as the user interface
plus the DECmate III.
>From a rather humorous point of view, the first time
I demonstrated the use of the VT103 with a hard
disk drive inside back around 1990 when a plain
VT100 was still a well known terminal, almost no one
believed that I could be running a complete PDP-11
system with what looked (on the outside) as if I had
just a VT100 INCLUDING a hard disk drive!
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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Received on Mon Sep 20 2004 - 16:39:47 BST