Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 08:40:52 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> To: Cory Kempf <ckempf@enigami.com> Cc: Tom Jackson <tom@geotec.net>, freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Have PDP Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.04.9903040832240.29440-100000@feral-gw> In-Reply-To: <5fpv6pqkzz.fsf@singularity.enigami.com>
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> > On Thu, 4 Mar 1999, Tom Jackson wrote: > > > I picked up a PDP 11/83 at a American Airlines garage sale. It has > > > the tape backup (and 2 boxes of tapes) but is missing the hard drives. > > > Is there any hope/use or have I acquired a big boat anchor? > > > > > Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com> writes: > > It's a boat anchor for running a full fledged Unix system, > > It "full fledged" refers specifically to uni with all the modern > gew-gaws and gizmos, sure. > > While it has been a long time, I could swear that not only was unix > *invented* on a PDP system (PDP8, if I recall), 2.9 BSD was written PDP-7 I believe... > for the PDP 11... Well, yes. Since I did a lot of the full 22 Bit Q-bus support for 2.8 and 2.9 whilst working for UC Davis, I do indeed remember this. You can do all kinds of clever things with the 2.9 or 2.10 versions. In particular, you could do memory resident overlays for the kernel which allowed you to substantially increase the effective address space. It's with something like that that I suppose that full networking could be tried out. When I said "full-fledged" I think I'm also referring to a lot of 32 bit assumptions that have crept in. How many people on this list can still remember how to write overlay descriptor files and how to divvy up the applications to fit within a 64kb (or 128KB for split I&D) space? Also, the speed of these beasts which seemed fast then would seem *intolerably* slow now. When I did a wad of work on a v7 variant Unix for tektronix, RK05s were the disks we used. That was 4800 512 byte blocks. That's 2.4MB. This mail thread has already exceeded the available storage on that puppy. What you *can* do with these systems which the x86 systems really have not done particularly well in is run non-Unix real time systems, e.g. for lab control. I've never warmed to VxWorks and still miss RT-11. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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