On 04/04/2013 10:01 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Apparently not. The reason I came up with the device is that I used a
PDP 11/40 with a DU11 to connect to a Burroughs B7700 using an RJE like
protocol. It was called SYSTEM/SATCOM IIRC. The PDP ran RT-11 V4. Other
than that, networks were built using 1200 baud modems on serial lines.
No DMF32 nor DZ11 in '79. How did one connect all those VT52's and
LA36's, via a DL11?
I thought DZ11s were around back then. But if not, the DH11 sure
was, 16
lines, DMA output.
Pretty sure they had DMA input too.
Nope. DMA output only.
Crap, really?
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud.
19.2K.
Not the original DH-11. 9600 was the highest, unless you count the
external clock ability they have.
Mine was a DH-11AD, and it definitely went to 19.2K.
But they DH-11 is way better than a DZ-11. The only problem being (as
mentioned), they were big. A whole 9-slot backplane for one controller.
Yes. I had one on my 11/34a years ago; it was in an external expansion chassis. I did love that mux, though! I got one again a couple of years ago, not sure which machine I'll put it in.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 2013-04-05 02:02, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 04/04/2013 05:28 PM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
Apparently not. The reason I came up with the device is that I used a
PDP 11/40 with a DU11 to connect to a Burroughs B7700 using an RJE like
protocol. It was called SYSTEM/SATCOM IIRC. The PDP ran RT-11 V4. Other
than that, networks were built using 1200 baud modems on serial lines.
No DMF32 nor DZ11 in '79. How did one connect all those VT52's and
LA36's, via a DL11?
I thought DZ11s were around back then. But if not, the DH11 sure was, 16
lines, DMA output.
Pretty sure they had DMA input too.
Nope. DMA output only.
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud.
19.2K.
Not the original DH-11. 9600 was the highest, unless you count the external clock ability they have.
But they DH-11 is way better than a DZ-11. The only problem being (as mentioned), they were big. A whole 9-slot backplane for one controller.
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
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 04/04/2013 08:02 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
nope. we did not run decnet in those days. remember I'm one of the
authors of the original tcp/ip implementation for vms :-)
Ah right. I forgot about that!
On Apr 4, 2013, at 6:50 PM, "Cory Smelosky" <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 04/04/2013 06:44 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
below..
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:28 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com
<mailto:Paul_Koning at dell.com>> wrote:
I thought DZ11s were around back then.
They are just becoming popular in the early 1980s, but is possible they
were around by 1979.
But Cory is using VMS 1.x. I'm trying to remember, we had VAX Serial
#1 at CMU in 1977/78 - which ran VMS 1.x of course. It must have been
connected to the original "CMU Front End" which were dedicated PDP-11s,
filled with DL11s and CMU ASLI's. Originally, which Front End machine
dedicate which systems you saw. The connection between the host to the
front end was parallel port, it must have been an DR-11B's back to back
but I've forgotten what that HW was (boy those bits have rotted in my
memory).
But if not, the DH11 sure was, 16 lines, DMA output.
And unless you used Able Computer's clone of it the (DHDM), a full
Unibus "system unit" of TTL hardware. What a beast, but full modem
control that the DZ did not do and actually could drive the lines
without killing the processor., which DZs and DL/KL's did..
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud. For networking, you'd
use a DMC-11 unless your OS supported the cheaper devices and money
was that tight -- that one goes back to about 1976 and delivers up
to 1 Mb/s depending on model (up to 56 kB/s long haul, given
suitable modems).
Hmm - are the DMC and DMR that old? I remember fighting the firmware in
the them to allow high speed serial networking. They had a dedicated
microprocessor on them (8080A or 8085 IIRC - but it may have been
something custom). They were expensive, which why Berk-NET used 9600
baud serial lines, until we got 3COM & Interlan Ethernet cards at
Berkeley in 1983.
CMU would get Xerox 3Mhz Ethernet cards for many of the Vaxen and 11s in
the 70s when it was still just Xerox. What would become the Cisco
Router has it origin in some work using PDP-11's and Xerox cards to
create the "distributed front-end" - which allowed more terminals to be
connected to N machines and you could get to any system that was on the
any of the front ends. It was all very cool and bleeding edge..
Lots of terminals with single line interfaces would be really ugly.
Amen. DZ's were not much better either, because the interrupt rate at
9600 would like a 1MIP Vax.
But I do remember our college main timesharing system, in 1973, a
PDP-11/20 with 28 kW of memory, RSTS V4A, and 16 terminals on 16
separate KL11 or DL11 interfaces. Oh yes, and a mean time between
crashes of about 1 day.
Are you sure it was a 11/20, not an 11/40? I did not think RSTS could
run without the MMU. With 16 DL/KL11's even with an 11/40 the
interrupt rate had to been wretched.
That said, in late 1979 when I was at Tek Labs, I took an 11/70 and put
96 serial ports of Able DH/DM into it. Amazingly enough that V7 Unix
box provided more cycles to more people than the CDC Cyber it sat next
too in the machine room.
Clem
Along with having a memory of all of this, you wouldn't happen to have
VMS 1.x kits, would you? I'm having difficulty tracking down DECnet for
this.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
Hello!
Of course. Six cybermen are working to make sure you forget all sorts
of things related to the area around you.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On 04/04/2013 08:02 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
nope. we did not run decnet in those days. remember I'm one of the authors of the original tcp/ip implementation for vms :-)
Ah right. I forgot about that!
On Apr 4, 2013, at 6:50 PM, "Cory Smelosky" <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 04/04/2013 06:44 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
below..
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:28 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com
<mailto:Paul_Koning at dell.com>> wrote:
I thought DZ11s were around back then.
They are just becoming popular in the early 1980s, but is possible they
were around by 1979.
But Cory is using VMS 1.x. I'm trying to remember, we had VAX Serial
#1 at CMU in 1977/78 - which ran VMS 1.x of course. It must have been
connected to the original "CMU Front End" which were dedicated PDP-11s,
filled with DL11s and CMU ASLI's. Originally, which Front End machine
dedicate which systems you saw. The connection between the host to the
front end was parallel port, it must have been an DR-11B's back to back
but I've forgotten what that HW was (boy those bits have rotted in my
memory).
But if not, the DH11 sure was, 16 lines, DMA output.
And unless you used Able Computer's clone of it the (DHDM), a full
Unibus "system unit" of TTL hardware. What a beast, but full modem
control that the DZ did not do and actually could drive the lines
without killing the processor., which DZs and DL/KL's did..
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud. For networking, you'd
use a DMC-11 unless your OS supported the cheaper devices and money
was that tight -- that one goes back to about 1976 and delivers up
to 1 Mb/s depending on model (up to 56 kB/s long haul, given
suitable modems).
Hmm - are the DMC and DMR that old? I remember fighting the firmware in
the them to allow high speed serial networking. They had a dedicated
microprocessor on them (8080A or 8085 IIRC - but it may have been
something custom). They were expensive, which why Berk-NET used 9600
baud serial lines, until we got 3COM & Interlan Ethernet cards at
Berkeley in 1983.
CMU would get Xerox 3Mhz Ethernet cards for many of the Vaxen and 11s in
the 70s when it was still just Xerox. What would become the Cisco
Router has it origin in some work using PDP-11's and Xerox cards to
create the "distributed front-end" - which allowed more terminals to be
connected to N machines and you could get to any system that was on the
any of the front ends. It was all very cool and bleeding edge..
Lots of terminals with single line interfaces would be really ugly.
Amen. DZ's were not much better either, because the interrupt rate at
9600 would like a 1MIP Vax.
But I do remember our college main timesharing system, in 1973, a
PDP-11/20 with 28 kW of memory, RSTS V4A, and 16 terminals on 16
separate KL11 or DL11 interfaces. Oh yes, and a mean time between
crashes of about 1 day.
Are you sure it was a 11/20, not an 11/40? I did not think RSTS could
run without the MMU. With 16 DL/KL11's even with an 11/40 the
interrupt rate had to been wretched.
That said, in late 1979 when I was at Tek Labs, I took an 11/70 and put
96 serial ports of Able DH/DM into it. Amazingly enough that V7 Unix
box provided more cycles to more people than the CDC Cyber it sat next
too in the machine room.
Clem
Along with having a memory of all of this, you wouldn't happen to have VMS 1.x kits, would you? I'm having difficulty tracking down DECnet for this.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
nope. we did not run decnet in those days. remember I'm one of the authors of the original tcp/ip implementation for vms :-)
On Apr 4, 2013, at 6:50 PM, "Cory Smelosky" <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 04/04/2013 06:44 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
below..
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:28 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com
<mailto:Paul_Koning at dell.com>> wrote:
I thought DZ11s were around back then.
They are just becoming popular in the early 1980s, but is possible they
were around by 1979.
But Cory is using VMS 1.x. I'm trying to remember, we had VAX Serial
#1 at CMU in 1977/78 - which ran VMS 1.x of course. It must have been
connected to the original "CMU Front End" which were dedicated PDP-11s,
filled with DL11s and CMU ASLI's. Originally, which Front End machine
dedicate which systems you saw. The connection between the host to the
front end was parallel port, it must have been an DR-11B's back to back
but I've forgotten what that HW was (boy those bits have rotted in my
memory).
But if not, the DH11 sure was, 16 lines, DMA output.
And unless you used Able Computer's clone of it the (DHDM), a full
Unibus "system unit" of TTL hardware. What a beast, but full modem
control that the DZ did not do and actually could drive the lines
without killing the processor., which DZs and DL/KL's did..
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud. For networking, you'd
use a DMC-11 unless your OS supported the cheaper devices and money
was that tight -- that one goes back to about 1976 and delivers up
to 1 Mb/s depending on model (up to 56 kB/s long haul, given
suitable modems).
Hmm - are the DMC and DMR that old? I remember fighting the firmware in
the them to allow high speed serial networking. They had a dedicated
microprocessor on them (8080A or 8085 IIRC - but it may have been
something custom). They were expensive, which why Berk-NET used 9600
baud serial lines, until we got 3COM & Interlan Ethernet cards at
Berkeley in 1983.
CMU would get Xerox 3Mhz Ethernet cards for many of the Vaxen and 11s in
the 70s when it was still just Xerox. What would become the Cisco
Router has it origin in some work using PDP-11's and Xerox cards to
create the "distributed front-end" - which allowed more terminals to be
connected to N machines and you could get to any system that was on the
any of the front ends. It was all very cool and bleeding edge..
Lots of terminals with single line interfaces would be really ugly.
Amen. DZ's were not much better either, because the interrupt rate at
9600 would like a 1MIP Vax.
But I do remember our college main timesharing system, in 1973, a
PDP-11/20 with 28 kW of memory, RSTS V4A, and 16 terminals on 16
separate KL11 or DL11 interfaces. Oh yes, and a mean time between
crashes of about 1 day.
Are you sure it was a 11/20, not an 11/40? I did not think RSTS could
run without the MMU. With 16 DL/KL11's even with an 11/40 the
interrupt rate had to been wretched.
That said, in late 1979 when I was at Tek Labs, I took an 11/70 and put
96 serial ports of Able DH/DM into it. Amazingly enough that V7 Unix
box provided more cycles to more people than the CDC Cyber it sat next
too in the machine room.
Clem
Along with having a memory of all of this, you wouldn't happen to have VMS 1.x kits, would you? I'm having difficulty tracking down DECnet for this.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
On 04/04/2013 05:28 PM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
Apparently not. The reason I came up with the device is that I used a
PDP 11/40 with a DU11 to connect to a Burroughs B7700 using an RJE like
protocol. It was called SYSTEM/SATCOM IIRC. The PDP ran RT-11 V4. Other
than that, networks were built using 1200 baud modems on serial lines.
No DMF32 nor DZ11 in '79. How did one connect all those VT52's and
LA36's, via a DL11?
I thought DZ11s were around back then. But if not, the DH11 sure was, 16
lines, DMA output.
Pretty sure they had DMA input too.
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud.
19.2K.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 04/04/2013 07:20 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:38 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 4 Apr 2013, at 18:36, "Gregg Levine" <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 4 Apr 2013, at 18:07, "Gregg Levine" <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 4 Apr 2013, at 17:39, "Gregg Levine" <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 04/04/2013 05:22 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-04-04 22:41, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On 04/04/2013 04:35 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
Afternoon all,
I managed to get this to boot in SIMH with minimal effort. (Started
from
VMS 3.x and then installed 1.5 with a bunch of devices disabled)
sim> b rp2
Loading boot code from vmb.exe
VAX/VMS Version 1.50 12-APR-1979 09:30
PLEASE ENTER DATE AND TIME (DD-MMM-YYYY HH:MM) 04-APR-2013 14:39
OPCOM, 4-APR-2013 14:39:06.22, LOGFILE INITIALIZED,
OPERATOR=_OPA0:
$ !
$ ! VAX/VMS system startup - Release 1
$ !
$ SHOW TIME
4-APR-2013 14:39:06
$ SET NOVERIFY
%MOUNT-I-MOUNTED, CONSOLE mounted on _DXA1:
Login quotas - Interactive limit=64, Current interactive value=0
SYSTEM job terminated at 4-APR-2013 14:39:06.49
Accounting information:
Buffered I/O count: 139 Peak working set size: 98
Direct I/O count: 38 Peak virtual size: 110
Page faults: 287 Mounted volumes: 1
Elapsed CPU time: 0 00:00:00.12 Elapsed time: 0
00:00:00.26
Username: SYSTEM
Password:
Welcome to VAX/VMS Version 1.50
$ sh network
NETWORK UNAVAILABLE
What kind of networking could I get working on this? Pre-Phase-IV
using a
device SIMH doesn't have emulation support for? ;)
I can upload this disk image if anyone wants it.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
Hello!
I am impressed. What device is this that SIMH does not emulate?
It might emulate all I'd need. I'm not sure what networking on VMS this
old would have been like. I just need to find documentation of VAX/VMS
1.50. ;)
Well... This is pre-ethernet and pre-DECnet phase IV... Serial ports
then? Or DMC, or something similar...?
Hmm. I need to find the DECnet kit so I can figure out what devices it
supports.
Johnny
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
Hello!
Okay... Now where'd the tape come from?
A tarball of a bunch of old VMS versions Dave gave me awhile ago.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
Hello!
Hmmm, the man surrounded by the rioting yetis. They are rioting
because they want more space.
Is it allowed to provide them as well? Or do I need to ask him off list?
Not sure. Probably best you play it safe and ask him off list.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
Hello!
Downloading it now. Your site tells mine about all of twenty minutes.
Much less time than it took to upload it. ;)
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
Hello!
Okay all done. You can return it to your right hand left disk locker.
Let me know if everything works okay for you.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:38 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 4 Apr 2013, at 18:36, "Gregg Levine" <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 4 Apr 2013, at 18:07, "Gregg Levine" <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:04 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 4 Apr 2013, at 17:39, "Gregg Levine" <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:32 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On 04/04/2013 05:22 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-04-04 22:41, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On 04/04/2013 04:35 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
Afternoon all,
I managed to get this to boot in SIMH with minimal effort. (Started
from
VMS 3.x and then installed 1.5 with a bunch of devices disabled)
sim> b rp2
Loading boot code from vmb.exe
VAX/VMS Version 1.50 12-APR-1979 09:30
PLEASE ENTER DATE AND TIME (DD-MMM-YYYY HH:MM) 04-APR-2013 14:39
OPCOM, 4-APR-2013 14:39:06.22, LOGFILE INITIALIZED,
OPERATOR=_OPA0:
$ !
$ ! VAX/VMS system startup - Release 1
$ !
$ SHOW TIME
4-APR-2013 14:39:06
$ SET NOVERIFY
%MOUNT-I-MOUNTED, CONSOLE mounted on _DXA1:
Login quotas - Interactive limit=64, Current interactive value=0
SYSTEM job terminated at 4-APR-2013 14:39:06.49
Accounting information:
Buffered I/O count: 139 Peak working set size: 98
Direct I/O count: 38 Peak virtual size: 110
Page faults: 287 Mounted volumes: 1
Elapsed CPU time: 0 00:00:00.12 Elapsed time: 0
00:00:00.26
Username: SYSTEM
Password:
Welcome to VAX/VMS Version 1.50
$ sh network
NETWORK UNAVAILABLE
What kind of networking could I get working on this? Pre-Phase-IV
using a
device SIMH doesn't have emulation support for? ;)
I can upload this disk image if anyone wants it.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
Hello!
I am impressed. What device is this that SIMH does not emulate?
It might emulate all I'd need. I'm not sure what networking on VMS this
old would have been like. I just need to find documentation of VAX/VMS
1.50. ;)
Well... This is pre-ethernet and pre-DECnet phase IV... Serial ports
then? Or DMC, or something similar...?
Hmm. I need to find the DECnet kit so I can figure out what devices it
supports.
Johnny
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
Hello!
Okay... Now where'd the tape come from?
A tarball of a bunch of old VMS versions Dave gave me awhile ago.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
Hello!
Hmmm, the man surrounded by the rioting yetis. They are rioting
because they want more space.
Is it allowed to provide them as well? Or do I need to ask him off list?
Not sure. Probably best you play it safe and ask him off list.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
Hello!
Downloading it now. Your site tells mine about all of twenty minutes.
Much less time than it took to upload it. ;)
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
Hello!
Okay all done. You can return it to your right hand left disk locker.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On 04/04/2013 06:44 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
below..
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:28 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com
<mailto:Paul_Koning at dell.com>> wrote:
I thought DZ11s were around back then.
They are just becoming popular in the early 1980s, but is possible they
were around by 1979.
But Cory is using VMS 1.x. I'm trying to remember, we had VAX Serial
#1 at CMU in 1977/78 - which ran VMS 1.x of course. It must have been
connected to the original "CMU Front End" which were dedicated PDP-11s,
filled with DL11s and CMU ASLI's. Originally, which Front End machine
dedicate which systems you saw. The connection between the host to the
front end was parallel port, it must have been an DR-11B's back to back
but I've forgotten what that HW was (boy those bits have rotted in my
memory).
But if not, the DH11 sure was, 16 lines, DMA output.
And unless you used Able Computer's clone of it the (DHDM), a full
Unibus "system unit" of TTL hardware. What a beast, but full modem
control that the DZ did not do and actually could drive the lines
without killing the processor., which DZs and DL/KL's did..
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud. For networking, you'd
use a DMC-11 unless your OS supported the cheaper devices and money
was that tight -- that one goes back to about 1976 and delivers up
to 1 Mb/s depending on model (up to 56 kB/s long haul, given
suitable modems).
Hmm - are the DMC and DMR that old? I remember fighting the firmware in
the them to allow high speed serial networking. They had a dedicated
microprocessor on them (8080A or 8085 IIRC - but it may have been
something custom). They were expensive, which why Berk-NET used 9600
baud serial lines, until we got 3COM & Interlan Ethernet cards at
Berkeley in 1983.
CMU would get Xerox 3Mhz Ethernet cards for many of the Vaxen and 11s in
the 70s when it was still just Xerox. What would become the Cisco
Router has it origin in some work using PDP-11's and Xerox cards to
create the "distributed front-end" - which allowed more terminals to be
connected to N machines and you could get to any system that was on the
any of the front ends. It was all very cool and bleeding edge..
Lots of terminals with single line interfaces would be really ugly.
Amen. DZ's were not much better either, because the interrupt rate at
9600 would like a 1MIP Vax.
But I do remember our college main timesharing system, in 1973, a
PDP-11/20 with 28 kW of memory, RSTS V4A, and 16 terminals on 16
separate KL11 or DL11 interfaces. Oh yes, and a mean time between
crashes of about 1 day.
Are you sure it was a 11/20, not an 11/40? I did not think RSTS could
run without the MMU. With 16 DL/KL11's even with an 11/40 the
interrupt rate had to been wretched.
That said, in late 1979 when I was at Tek Labs, I took an 11/70 and put
96 serial ports of Able DH/DM into it. Amazingly enough that V7 Unix
box provided more cycles to more people than the CDC Cyber it sat next
too in the machine room.
Clem
Along with having a memory of all of this, you wouldn't happen to have VMS 1.x kits, would you? I'm having difficulty tracking down DECnet for this.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
below..
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 5:28 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
I thought DZ11s were around back then.
They are just becoming popular in the early 1980s, but is possible they were around by 1979.
But Cory is using VMS 1.x. I'm trying to remember, we had VAX Serial #1 at CMU in 1977/78 - which ran VMS 1.x of course. It must have been connected to the original "CMU Front End" which were dedicated PDP-11s, filled with DL11s and CMU ASLI's. Originally, which Front End machine dedicate which systems you saw. The connection between the host to the front end was parallel port, it must have been an DR-11B's back to back but I've forgotten what that HW was (boy those bits have rotted in my memory).
But if not, the DH11 sure was, 16 lines, DMA output.
And unless you used Able Computer's clone of it the (DHDM), a full Unibus "system unit" of TTL hardware. What a beast, but full modem control that the DZ did not do and actually could drive the lines without killing the processor., which DZs and DL/KL's did.
But that's for terminals up to 9600 baud. For networking, you'd use a DMC-11 unless your OS supported the cheaper devices and money was that tight -- that one goes back to about 1976 and delivers up to 1 Mb/s depending on model (up to 56 kB/s long haul, given suitable modems).
Hmm - are the DMC and DMR that old? I remember fighting the firmware in the them to allow high speed serial networking. They had a dedicated microprocessor on them (8080A or 8085 IIRC - but it may have been something custom). They were expensive, which why Berk-NET used 9600 baud serial lines, until we got 3COM & Interlan Ethernet cards at Berkeley in 1983.
CMU would get Xerox 3Mhz Ethernet cards for many of the Vaxen and 11s in the 70s when it was still just Xerox. What would become the Cisco Router has it origin in some work using PDP-11's and Xerox cards to create the "distributed front-end" - which allowed more terminals to be connected to N machines and you could get to any system that was on the any of the front ends. It was all very cool and bleeding edge.
Lots of terminals with single line interfaces would be really ugly.
Amen. DZ's were not much better either, because the interrupt rate at 9600 would like a 1MIP Vax.
But I do remember our college main timesharing system, in 1973, a PDP-11/20 with 28 kW of memory, RSTS V4A, and 16 terminals on 16 separate KL11 or DL11 interfaces. Oh yes, and a mean time between crashes of about 1 day.
Are you sure it was a 11/20, not an 11/40? I did not think RSTS could run without the MMU. With 16 DL/KL11's even with an 11/40 the interrupt rate had to been wretched.
That said, in late 1979 when I was at Tek Labs, I took an 11/70 and put 96 serial ports of Able DH/DM into it. Amazingly enough that V7 Unix box provided more cycles to more people than the CDC Cyber it sat next too in the machine room.
Clem
