On Mon, 15 Nov 2021, Dave McGuire wrote: [pics chopped] WOW. Now that's really cool. It's difficult to tell from the pictures, but how many students were there total? Fred

Hey, I didn't have any information about FANG:: Should I put it as a real PDP-11/70 then? What OS is it running when on HECnet? (And it's always fun to see people actually use these machine in the proper way...) Johnny On 2021-11-15 22:57, Dave McGuire wrote: -- 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 11/16/21 11:23 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote: We have many nodes defined here that come up on HECnet when they're up. FANG:: is 61.5. Sure. It currently only runs RSX-11M-PLUS v4.6, but eventually we'll set up RSTS/E, RT-11, and 2.11BSD system disks for it. I suppose the only other one that will appear on HECnet is RSTS/E. The goal for that machine, with its quad pack of RA73s, is to cover most of the OSs that people may want to run. Another you can add is PIXEL::, at 61.22, which is a PDP-11/83 (real hardware) that runs RSX-11M-PLUS most of the time. That's at my place, not at the museum. I usually run it through the winter; I brought it up last week. I will formalize the others and get you the info as time permits. Yes. :) When I was a kid in the early 1980s, it was a huge fantasy of mine to be the admin of a PDP-11 with users on it. As I grew up that became less and less of a possibility, but I was the admin of a few VAXen running VMS in the late 1980s into the early 1990s. And then of course UNIX systems with many thousands of users. And of course we run PDP-11s and do group tours at the museum all the time, for six years now. But yesterday, with a group tour in which everyone was doing pretty much the same thing on the same machine, was very different, and finally fulfilled that old fantasy of mine. The only thing that would've made it better, but only a little, is if those terminals were connected to DH11s. They're all connected to DECservers and their sessions were via LAT. We can't really dedicate terminals to machines at LSSM, because there are many more machines than terminals. Not even consoles are dedicated. All of the consoles (even the PDP-8s) are connected to DECserver ports with local services defined, so people can run any kind of terminal they want on a give machine. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

Wow. It's actually quite an honor to hear that. :-) -Dave On 11/16/21 11:34 AM, Steve Davidson wrote: -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 2021-11-16 18:54, Dave McGuire wrote: Yes it does. Sources are on MIM. See MIM::HECNET:DDB.C and MIM::HECNET:DDBDTR.CMD (Yes, DDB itself is written in C.) What? You only have the four slots in the CPU backplane? That's a rather unusal and limited 11/70 setup. I think it was pretty much standard that you had at least one BA11 box in any 11/70. That could potentially be much faster, yes. I haven't done any tests, but I suspect even some SCSI on the 11/70 and some modern disk would be a big improvement. I think seek times on the RA73 isn't that great. But the Unibus on the 11/70 is also known as possibly the slowest Unibus around. 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 11/16/21 1:05 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: Very nice, I will look at it. I've been wanting to learn Datatrieve programming. Thanks for the source! Yes, I removed the BA11-K expansion chassis when I got that system many years ago. The system was going into my house, years before I ever knew I would be able to finally realize my dream of opening a big-iron museum, and the only thing in the expansion chassis was a DH11 and a few DZ11s, and that chassis was the only thing in that extra rack. So, needing to reduce its size and power consumption for a home environment, I removed that chassis and rack from the configuration. That was about twenty years ago. The DL11-W, UDA50, and DELUA are currently the only Unibus peripherals on FANG. Now, with the machine at the museum with a lot more space and power, we're in the process of putting the expansion chassis back into the system, but with different contents. Yes, I assume so; that's the only way I've ever seen them in the field. Before we got the RA73s, I was running an Emulex UC17 and a 200MB SCSI drive on that system. I didn't do any tests either, but I think the bottleneck was the Unibus; the UDA50+RA73 doesn't really feel any different. That UC17 is now on my personal PDP-11/34 at home, connected to two Bernoulli 44MB drives. I make disk images under simh, and dd(1) them to cartridges to run on it. That 11/34 has no network interface, so it's not on HECnet, but I do run it occasionally, for soul-healing purposes. I may try to network it at some point. Yes, that's why we'd like to move our mass storage away from that, if we can make it all work. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 11/16/21 1:32 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: Ok, it sounds like that's a good example to learn from. I hope to dig into it soon(ish). That reminds me, I forgot to mention, FANG does have a TE16 on an RH70. We're waiting for Terry of Terry's Rubber Rollers to finish recovering from covid19 so we can get the roller re-done, but we've gotten it to the point where it pulls tape. Yes we very much want to plumb in that RL02. :-( If you get stuck and need RK07 work done, LSSM has an RK07 on a PDP-11/50, and another on a PDP-11/t55. The 11/34 is my favorite PDP-11, because it was my first, 36 years ago. (not this one, but one just like it) Yes, that would be very nice indeed. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA