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SYSGEN memories, Re: [HECnet] Silly RSX questions....

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

On 07/08/2012 12:30 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: Either you have never done an 11M SYSGEN, or else your requirements on "user friendly" are pretty high. The M+ SYSGEN gives you help and information at all times, gives sane questions that are understandable, and can be answered pretty straight forward. 11M SYSGEN on the other hand does not give much information, asks that you provide whole sequences of magic as responses sometimes, and is pretty much arcane. A manual beside you is recommended. :-) Oh MAN! A manual beside you is REQUIRED! ;) I first did an 11M v4.1 SYSGEN when I was about 17. I was fortunate to have a friend at work who gave me lots of advice, but as he was at work and my 11/34 was at home, the "question/answer latency" was very high! It took me a few nights and a few tries to get it right, but in the end those scripts were very well-written and everything worked out fine. This was in 1986, the band Genesis was touring, and I went to see them. I came into work the next day wearing the T-shirt I got at the concert, and my friend Richard (the guy helping me along with the SYSGEN) told me that "Genesis" should've been spelled "GEN-A-SYS"! I was intent on doing a SYSGEN because the installation I had on the machine had no printer support, and I was given an LA180 with an LS11 controller and was dying to get it running. (I have a weird duality about printers and books...I firmly believe that paper has been obsolete for decades, but I've got a library of 1000+ books here and a HUGE printer fetish...I have no explanation!) Eventually I did get it running and was happily printing out my Macro-11 and Swedish Pascal program listings all day long. :-) The LA180 is a unidirectional printer, so its characteristic noise is "aaaWEEEEE! aaaWEEE! aaaWEEE!" That sound on my current LA180 always brings back great memories. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

13 years, 2 months

11/23 addressing, was Re: [HECnet] Silly RSX questions....

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

On 07/08/2012 11:54 AM, G ran hling wrote: Just to "point on the nitty gritty details" To my knowledge; M+ will run on 11/23+ but not upon 11/23 ! (22 bit adressing required). This is not quite true! Most KDF11-A (dual-wide, non-"+") 11/23 CPUs DO in fact support 22-bit addressing. It is a common misconception that all dual-wide 11/23 CPUs only have 18-bit addressing. It is only the early revs of the dual-wide board that are limited to 18-bit addressing; prior to Rev C. The 11/23 was a very popular system in its day; DEC made a LOT of them...the vast majority of the boards you'll see in the field are Rev C or later. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by bob＠jfcl.com

Yes, 4MB is plenty of memory. But normal memory is often not the big issue in RSX, Yep, that's what killed the PDP-11. Huge physical address space; tiny virtual address space. We used to have to go thru all kinds of contortions (overlays and crap) to fit programs on the -11, even when there were loads of physical RAM available. Thanks for the tip on pool, though. Just out of curiosity, does RSX use supervisor mode on the processors that have it (typically that goes together with I&D space). 2bsd uses super mode just to get extra address space for the networking code. Also, don't forget to have the options included to allow for networking in the kernel. :-) Umm, Sure.... I trust that those will be obvious when I see them :-) your requirements on "user friendly" are pretty high. Well, you can boot the same VMS distro on any VAX ever made and it pretty much just figures it out :-) Just kidding, though - I'm not looking to start an argument about which OS is better. DECnet on 11M also means that you need to understand partitions, Partitions? You mean memory partitions? On a processor with an MMU?? I thought that was pretty much all dynamic on M and M+, and only unmapped systems (like 11S) had to worry about that. Ok, you recently pointed out that M can run on unmapped systems too, but the 11/23+ has a perfectly nice 22bit MMU and that's not an issue here. You know that an RQDX and RD32 are bog slow? Yes, but there are not a lot of other options on the 11/23+. There's an RL02 drive, but it's not clear that's actually faster; it's also lots smaller (in Mb, that is, not in cubic feet!) and probably not as reliable (although that last one is arguable). Besides, I'd rather keep the RL02 as removable media anyway. Bob

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2012-07-08 15:39, Bob Armstrong wrote: Thanks, guys - I didn't know that M+ would run on a 11/23. I have kits for M+ v4.3 and DECnet11-M+ v4.3 so that's what I'll try. As I remember the 11/23+ is pretty slow (like half or 1/3rd the speed of a 11/73) and an RD32 is not a huge amount of space (40Mb, although that's probably plenty for RSX). Any hints for what I should or should not include in the SYSGEN? As the 11/23+ don't have split I/D space, you are going to be running low on pool. Try to keep the number of devices, tasks, and other stuff down. Yes, 4MB is plenty of memory. But normal memory is often not the big issue in RSX, it is pool. Pool is the memory that the kernel uses for all kind of internal stuff, and it is restricted to what is addressable within 64K, minus what the kernel use for other stuff. On split I/D-space machines, all the kernel code are in I space, while pool is in D space. Without split I/D-space, both lots of the kernel code, as well as pool, must coexist in the same memory space. Also, don't forget to have the options included to allow for networking in the kernel. :-) Johnny wrote: SYSGEN, NETGEN and everything in between is rather more cryptic in 11M, just to warn you... :-) I guess I'm making the right choice :-) FWIW, I've done M+ SYSGENs before (years and years ago) and I don't remember those being exceptionally user friendly! Either you have never done an 11M SYSGEN, or else your requirements on "user friendly" are pretty high. The M+ SYSGEN gives you help and information at all times, gives sane questions that are understandable, and can be answered pretty straight forward. 11M SYSGEN on the other hand does not give much information, asks that you provide whole sequences of magic as responses sometimes, and is pretty much arcane. A manual beside you is recommended. :-) Never did DECnet on a 11, however. Actually I'd be tempted to use M because of the smaller footprint, but I don't have kits for that. I might be able to provide something. The smaller footprint is indeed a good thing here. DECnet on 11M also means that you need to understand partitions, since you need to set them up specifically, and understand how large they should be, and so on. M+ is pretty much just using the default memory partition for everything, and allocates stuff dynamically as needed. I'll probably just build the system on simh and, if it works, I can transfer the RD32 image over to the real hardware. You know that an RQDX and RD32 are bog slow? The actual CPU isn't the only reason why those systems are slow... The disk subsystems often is a big chunk of it. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by ahling＠eadc.se

Just to "point on the nitty gritty details" To my knowledge; M+ will run on 11/23+ but not upon 11/23 ! (22 bit adressing required). Please also give a thought which serial adapter that is required for terminal access. Old , traditional without buffers etc, or modern 8-port? One nice thing to include during sysgen would might be a TU58! - It connects to just about every system through one "regular" RS-232 port (properly adressed, though) There are fine PC-programs available emulating the old, true 1/4" tape hardware running over COM-port. This gives a path of transfering data "easilly" from SIMH to real HW until the network is up and running. I've heard that the "max block number" is never checed in the TU58 driver, so if the "tape" happens to be longer than an original tape doesn't matter! Happy experimenting! /G ran On 8 jul 2012 15:39 "Bob Armstrong" <bob at jfcl.com> wrote: Thanks, guys - I didn't know that M+ would run on a 11/23. I have kits for M+ v4.3 and DECnet11-M+ v4.3 so that's what I'll try. As I remember the 11/23+ is pretty slow (like half or 1/3rd the speed of a 11/73) and an RD32 is not a huge amount of space (40Mb, although that's probably plenty for RSX). Any hints for what I should or should not include in the SYSGEN? Johnny wrote: SYSGEN, NETGEN and everything in between is rather more cryptic in 11M, just to warn you... :-) I guess I'm making the right choice :-) FWIW, I've done M+ SYSGENs before (years and years ago) and I don't remember those being exceptionally user friendly! Never did DECnet on a 11, however. Actually I'd be tempted to use M because of the smaller footprint, but I don't have kits for that. I'll probably just build the system on simh and, if it works, I can transfer the RD32 image over to the real hardware. Bob

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by bob＠jfcl.com

Thanks, guys - I didn't know that M+ would run on a 11/23. I have kits for M+ v4.3 and DECnet11-M+ v4.3 so that's what I'll try. As I remember the 11/23+ is pretty slow (like half or 1/3rd the speed of a 11/73) and an RD32 is not a huge amount of space (40Mb, although that's probably plenty for RSX). Any hints for what I should or should not include in the SYSGEN? Johnny wrote: SYSGEN, NETGEN and everything in between is rather more cryptic in 11M, just to warn you... :-) I guess I'm making the right choice :-) FWIW, I've done M+ SYSGENs before (years and years ago) and I don't remember those being exceptionally user friendly! Never did DECnet on a 11, however. Actually I'd be tempted to use M because of the smaller footprint, but I don't have kits for that. I'll probably just build the system on simh and, if it works, I can transfer the RD32 image over to the real hardware. Bob

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by jg＠jordi.guillaumes.name

As for the rest of the question, yes, 11M supports DECnet with DEQNA. SYSGEN, NETGEN and everything in between is rather more cryptic in 11M, just to warn you... :-) I've been able to generate successfully a 11M system, but I've not found any DECNET-11 kit for it... Johnny

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2012-07-08 05:28, Bob Armstrong wrote: I have a 11/23+ system with 2xRD32 disks and a DEQNA (as well as various peripherals RX50, RL02, RX02, Kennedy 9 track). RSX-11M+ needs I&D space so it can t run on a 11/23+, right? Does RSX-11M support DECnet and a DEQNA? FWIW, the system as 2048K of RAM quite a bit by 11/23 standards. I could look it up if I had the SPDs for DECnet-11, but I haven t seen those online and I figure there are lots of HECnet people who would know. Actually I have a KDJ11 (11/73) card and I could just swap the CPUs easily enough, but I kind of like the system the way it is. If it is possible to run DECnet on the 11/23+, my next trick will be to locate kits and figure out how to install it. Hi, Bob. Actually, RSX-11M-PLUS does not require I/D-space. It does, however, require 22-bit addressing. The 11/23+, as well as the 11/24 are supported by M+. But some things get rather tight without I/D-space. But it should work. As for the rest of the question, yes, 11M supports DECnet with DEQNA. SYSGEN, NETGEN and everything in between is rather more cryptic in 11M, just to warn you... :-) Johnny

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by form＠pdp-11.org.ru

Bob Armstrong wrote: I have a 11/23+ system with 2xRD32 disks and a DEQNA (as well as various peripherals RX50, RL02, RX02, Kennedy 9 track). RSX-11M+ needs I&D space so it can t run on a 11/23+, right? Does RSX-11M support DECnet and a DEQNA? FWIW, the system as 2048K of RAM quite a M+ SYSGEN: >; RSX-11M-PLUS may be run on the following PDP-11 processors: >; >; 11/23-PLUS (also called MicroPDP-11/23 and 11/23-B) >; 11/24 >; 11/44 >; 11/53 >; 11/70 >; 11/73 (also called MicroPDP-11/73) >; 11/83 (also called MicroPDP-11/83) >; 11/93 (also called MicroPDP-11/93) >; 11/84 >; 11/94 >; >; M70,80,90,100 MENTEC modules (treated as an 11/83) >; M11 processor (MENTEC) >; >; LSI-11/73 RSX-11M supports DECnet and DEQNA.

13 years, 2 months

Silly RSX questions....

by bob＠jfcl.com

I have a 11/23+ system with 2xRD32 disks and a DEQNA (as well as various peripherals RX50, RL02, RX02, Kennedy 9 track). RSX-11M+ needs I&D space so it can t run on a 11/23+, right? Does RSX-11M support DECnet and a DEQNA? FWIW, the system as 2048K of RAM quite a bit by 11/23 standards. I could look it up if I had the SPDs for DECnet-11, but I haven t seen those online and I figure there are lots of HECnet people who would know. Actually I have a KDJ11 (11/73) card and I could just swap the CPUs easily enough, but I kind of like the system the way it is. If it is possible to run DECnet on the 11/23+, my next trick will be to locate kits and figure out how to install it. Bob

13 years, 2 months

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