17 May
2013
17 May
'13
10:49 p.m.
On 17 May 2013, at 15:45, "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy?
Often - that was the way. There were TU58 tapes and floppies from Evans Hall that can
with your 4.1BSD tapes that did the cold boot. That code contained enough of a system to
talk to the tape drive.
The Design and Implementation book would agree. ;)
Apparently utilities were included to write the image to the frontend filesystem.
Before Kriddle and Asa would form MtXinu, a bunch of us in Cory Hall hacked to a raw boot
system, and I do not remember why. IIRC it was Asa Romberger that did that hack, and he
might have done it originally for IngVax. I do remember Bob would come to test it on
one of my 780's (Sprite - aka UCBCAD) because we have newer/fancier/self threading
9-tracks with vacuum columns (model number escapes me) than we had in Evan.
We had 3 780s (Coke, Sprite and Tab) in the CAD group, but big (Sprite) was one donated
by DEC and was one of the only ones on campus that did not have a lot of
"foreign" hardware in it - so Sam Leffler, Bob and I would use it to do tests
when we wanted to make sure the "Pure Maynard" stuff still worked.