On Jul 2, 2012, at 11:47 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2012-07-02 16:40, Paul_Koning at
Dell.com wrote:
On Jul 2, 2012, at 10:21 AM, Bob Armstrong wrote:
...
RSX-11S was the "embedded system OS" of the PDP-11 world (at least as far
as DEC's offerings went).
That and RT-11. And MicroPower-Pascal, of which I know nothing apart from its name.
Was that the RTOS used with the T-11 (the first single-chip PDP-11?) I seem to remember
that it was used as the RTOS in the LA-120 printer. Having a real OS allowed it to do
fancy stuff like bidirectional printing, the first DEC printer to do so.
I'm not sure how practical the other ones were as embedded systems. The big point with
RSX-11S is that it's all just one binary for the whole system. There are no disks. In
fact, you can't even have things on disk in the sense that you think for other
systems.
Without disks, you could put this all on PROM, flash, or whatever. Or (which I think was
more common), download from the net, and then run.
As far as I know, RT likes a disk, or something disklike, such as DECtape (real or even
the fake "DECtape II"). But Micropower, I'm pretty sure, is a deep
embedded system that runs from ROM/RAM.
paul