HECnet

hecnet@lists.dfupdate.se

15556 discussions

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by clemc＠ccc.com

I was always accused by Roger Gourd and a few others of that typo being intentional, but I can not say it was. One of the more interesting case of where my dyslexia got me in a lot trouble. I will say it did make a stronger impact. On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Bill Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote: Was this where the dickless server line actually came from? An internet classic! -- d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: Unibus VAXen basically means VAX-11 machines. They booted either from VMB on console media, or (for the 11/750) from a boot block. No network capabilities there. They could not even boot from tape. Amen, and seemingly hard to believe. It seems so primitive by today's standards. But it actually makes sense. Disks in those days were a huge expense within the total system price, but definitely part of it. A system in the Vax class really needed to be self-supporting. So the concept of it not have local storage would have been strange and frankly not able to be sold. Let's also not forget that in those days Ethernet HW was not particularly cheap either. The 3Com stinger taps cost about $500 each, and that did not include the $~2-3K for the 3Cxxx for the Unibus. I remember when Apollo announced the "Twins" machines were 2 nodes with a shared single disk in ~1984/85 - which actually did work reasonably well. Sun did the "diskless" Sun-3 in response, and they did not. I do not think DEC even tried. The funny part is that Sun's answer was an accidental marketing genius - because it became the worlds best add in disk upgrade business for them (diskless Sun's were known as having the lack of male anatomy). I was leading the networking group at Masscomp at the time, and my team refused to do diskless support - because thought it was a stupid product (there is a infamous email I sent to all of the company with a dyslexic typo in it - which I wish I still had). I was technically 100% right. A WS-500 cost $1.5K less that and equivalent Sun 3. But, end users could buy a diskless Sun3 for $2K less than the WS-500. -- only to discover the performance sucked. So would have to go back to Sun at $5K a crack to get the disk subsystem. The genius was the sales got the original sale, and you wer not going to through out the Sun3 and get the cheaper system. You would spend the $5K later and make it better - sigh. Clem

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by Paul_Koning＠Dell.com

On May 17, 2013, at 1:43 PM, John Wilson wrote: ... The DEQNA was such a mistake. Why DEC would break from eons of tradition and make the Q and U versions of something be not in the slightest compatible is beyond me. Apparently fitting on a dual-height card was more important. I think it does have a CPU (i8051?) but its ROM is mostly full of the PDP-11 boot/diag code (since the boot is way too big to fit in a typical PDP-11 boot PROM so all that does is suck the real boot out of the 8051). So they didn't have space for doing MOP in firmware. I don't think the QNA had any form of microprocessor on it. It's basically a brand X Ethernet NIC chip, plus interface logic to talk to the Qbus. And yes, the requirement was to make it small. Remember that the only alternative at the time was the UNA, which is 6 times as big! The big issue with the QNA is not that it's different. Different is easy to handle, just write another driver. The real issue is that it's unreliable. Even after 12 revisions (ECO level L) it still didn't work right. The LQA exists simply because it had become clear that the QNA would never work, no matter how many ECOs were created for it. How much of that came from faults in the NIC chip itself, and how much from the logic around it, I have no idea. QNA is not the only horrible Ethernet interface DEC designed. The CNA (for the Pro bus) is, if anything, even worse. It uses the Intel 82586, which has a horribly misdesigned excuse for a programming interface, full of race conditions that are obvious to anyone qualified to pass Comp Sci 101. paul

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by pechter＠gmail.com

Was this where the dickless server line actually came from? An internet classic! -- d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: Unibus VAXen basically means VAX-11 machines. They booted either from VMB on console media, or (for the 11/750) from a boot block. No network capabilities there. They could not even boot from tape. Amen, and seemingly hard to believe. It seems so primitive by today's standards. But it actually makes sense. Disks in those days were a huge expense within the total system price, but definitely part of it. A system in the Vax class really needed to be self-supporting. So the concept of it not have local storage would have been strange and frankly not able to be sold. Let's also not forget that in those days Ethernet HW was not particularly cheap either. The 3Com stinger taps cost about $500 each, and that did not include the $~2-3K for the 3Cxxx for the Unibus. I remember when Apollo announced the "Twins" machines were 2 nodes with a shared single disk in ~1984/85 - which actually did work reasonably well. Sun did the "diskless" Sun-3 in response, and they did not. I do not think DEC even tried. The funny part is that Sun's answer was an accidental marketing genius - because it became the worlds best add in disk upgrade business for them (diskless Sun's were known as having the lack of male anatomy). I was leading the networking group at Masscomp at the time, and my team refused to do diskless support - because thought it was a stupid product (there is a infamous email I sent to all of the company with a dyslexic typo in it - which I wish I still had). I was technically 100% right. A WS-500 cost $1.5K less that and equivalent Sun 3. But, end users could buy a diskless Sun3 for $2K less than the WS-500. -- only to discover the performance sucked. So would have to go back to Sun at $5K a crack to get the disk subsystem. The genius was the sales got the original sale, and you wer not going to through out the Sun3 and get the cheaper system. You would spend the $5K later and make it better - sigh. Clem

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by clemc＠ccc.com

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: Well, in all honesty. We did just cover network booted PDP-11s. Not to mention that PDP-11s could boot from tape pretty much from day 1. Yep - but it was a different target customer originally. The 11 was the take over the laboratory systems that the 8 had. And many of those systems did not have rotating storage in them. Cassette tape was not unheard of (and the PDP-11's could boot from cassette tape). The Vax was envisioned as a system that could move into the same class of customer and (use) as the 10 (and this start the 36/32 bit war). But both vax and 10's were supposed to the computing hub. As I have said before, the 750 was a part of that war between LDP (laboratory data products) enterprise folks. It's a big reason why Masscomp was formed. Dave Cane used to say that the MC-500 was the computer he had always wanted the 750 to be. That said, you're right, at some point -- network boot because de rigor but I >>think<< that was all post BI systems and long after I was tracking the vax closely.

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by b4＠gewt.net

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2013-05-17 21:22, Cory Smelosky wrote: On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2013-05-17 21:13, Cory Smelosky wrote: On Fri, 17 May 2013, Bob Armstrong wrote: Really? Not from tape? Interesting design choice... Old VAXes booted standalone BACKUP from the console media (TU58 or RX01). SA BACKUP then could talk to tape drives just fine. It's all you need to install VMS, so that was all they did. Ah right. Makes more sense how. How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy? The one time I did it, I actually hacked the boot loader into memory from the console, and started from there. The boot loader was listed in the manual. But (as I mentioned in another mail), this came from MtXinu. Not sure how other BSDs did it, as I never had an original distribution from any other. But once you had the system installed, you also created a console media which could boot the thing, as VMB was not able to boot a Unix system anyway, even from disk. Ahhh. That'd be why when I've installed 4.3BSD on the -11/780 simulator I needed an external executable to boot it. That sounds likely. Modern versions on VMB can boot Unix (like the version distributed with simh), but it still also requires that the system understand the information it gets passed by VMB. Doubt 4.3 understands that. NetBSD works fine with VMB. Even on the 11/780, now that we've identified that NetBSD wrote broken boot blocks for a long time, and that has been fixed. Yeah, I'd be surprised to see 4.3BSD understanding that. I wonder what my copy of The Design and Implementation says about the boot process... I like how recent NetBSD still supports the 11/780! Johnny -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-17 21:22, Cory Smelosky wrote: On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2013-05-17 21:13, Cory Smelosky wrote: On Fri, 17 May 2013, Bob Armstrong wrote: Really? Not from tape? Interesting design choice... Old VAXes booted standalone BACKUP from the console media (TU58 or RX01). SA BACKUP then could talk to tape drives just fine. It's all you need to install VMS, so that was all they did. Ah right. Makes more sense how. How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy? The one time I did it, I actually hacked the boot loader into memory from the console, and started from there. The boot loader was listed in the manual. But (as I mentioned in another mail), this came from MtXinu. Not sure how other BSDs did it, as I never had an original distribution from any other. But once you had the system installed, you also created a console media which could boot the thing, as VMB was not able to boot a Unix system anyway, even from disk. Ahhh. That'd be why when I've installed 4.3BSD on the -11/780 simulator I needed an external executable to boot it. That sounds likely. Modern versions on VMB can boot Unix (like the version distributed with simh), but it still also requires that the system understand the information it gets passed by VMB. Doubt 4.3 understands that. NetBSD works fine with VMB. Even on the 11/780, now that we've identified that NetBSD wrote broken boot blocks for a long time, and that has been fixed. Johnny

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by b4＠gewt.net

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2013-05-17 21:20, Bob Armstrong wrote: Also, the VAX-11/750 do not even use VMB... The 750 _could_ use VMB; you just had to load it from TU58. The 750 just didn't need VMB to boot from disk - it just had a "shortcut" (some might say a "hack") for that path. True. And the hack was pretty much "do it like PDP-11s do". :-) I have no problems with that approach! And I believe the hack worked just as well for booting Unix too; that's why the 750 was very popular with Unix sites. Indeed. For all of its primitiveness, this was actually an advantage. And of course, nobody ever wanted to boot anything but VMS... ;-) Well, DEC didn't, and they did build the machine after all. Didn't seem to stop any of the Unix crowd from using it too. :-) Don't get me wrong. I like bashing the VAX (and DEC), but I actually like the machine. Johnny -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-17 21:20, Bob Armstrong wrote: Also, the VAX-11/750 do not even use VMB... The 750 _could_ use VMB; you just had to load it from TU58. The 750 just didn't need VMB to boot from disk - it just had a "shortcut" (some might say a "hack") for that path. True. And the hack was pretty much "do it like PDP-11s do". :-) And I believe the hack worked just as well for booting Unix too; that's why the 750 was very popular with Unix sites. Indeed. For all of its primitiveness, this was actually an advantage. And of course, nobody ever wanted to boot anything but VMS... ;-) Well, DEC didn't, and they did build the machine after all. Didn't seem to stop any of the Unix crowd from using it too. :-) Don't get me wrong. I like bashing the VAX (and DEC), but I actually like the machine. Johnny

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by b4＠gewt.net

On Fri, 17 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2013-05-17 21:13, Cory Smelosky wrote: On Fri, 17 May 2013, Bob Armstrong wrote: Really? Not from tape? Interesting design choice... Old VAXes booted standalone BACKUP from the console media (TU58 or RX01). SA BACKUP then could talk to tape drives just fine. It's all you need to install VMS, so that was all they did. Ah right. Makes more sense how. How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy? The one time I did it, I actually hacked the boot loader into memory from the console, and started from there. The boot loader was listed in the manual. But (as I mentioned in another mail), this came from MtXinu. Not sure how other BSDs did it, as I never had an original distribution from any other. But once you had the system installed, you also created a console media which could boot the thing, as VMB was not able to boot a Unix system anyway, even from disk. Ahhh. That'd be why when I've installed 4.3BSD on the -11/780 simulator I needed an external executable to boot it. Johnny -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

12 years

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by bob＠jfcl.com

Also, the VAX-11/750 do not even use VMB... The 750 _could_ use VMB; you just had to load it from TU58. The 750 just didn't need VMB to boot from disk - it just had a "shortcut" (some might say a "hack") for that path. And I believe the hack worked just as well for booting Unix too; that's why the 750 was very popular with Unix sites. And of course, nobody ever wanted to boot anything but VMS... ;-) Well, DEC didn't, and they did build the machine after all. Didn't seem to stop any of the Unix crowd from using it too. Bob

12 years

Jump to page:

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

HECnet