[HECnet] This is probably been asked already but....

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-07-02 18:26, Steve Davidson wrote:


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE
[mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Bob Armstrong
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2012 12:10
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: RE: [HECnet] This is probably been asked already but....

The PRO was for later VAXen. 8800-range, I think.

    That must be where I saw it, because I remember a VAX with
what was clearly a PRO attached to it.   We used to joke that
it was the only way DEC could sell the PROs :-)

The 86x0 uses a T11, and runs RT-11.

    Was it like a FALCON/KXT11 board based thing, or some
custom T11 board?
How (where) did they get RT11 for it?   The T11 had a few
oddities (e.g. no bus timeout traps) and AFAIK RT11 was never
supported on T11 systems.   I've heard that there was an
unofficial, hacked up, copy of some RT11 release that would
work but I never saw a copy.

The 86x0 does in fact run a real version of RT-11.   The disk sub-system
was a RL0x (can't remember if it was 1 or 2).   It had its own set of
quirks - to say the least!   The sources have macros to deal with the
T-11 differences.   They were in the middle of the changes to RT-11 just
as I joined the group.   One of the guys spent quite a bit of time in
Marlboro, MA trying to get the sub-system to deal with the RL0x..   It
was a beast! :-)

It's an RL02.
Not sure what part of the RLV12 or RL02 that was a beast. It's a bog standard RLV12 and RL02. RT-11 in general supports this without any issues.

Yes, there is a Q-bus in a VAX-86x0. It's in the same box as the first Unibus. The Q-bus only have the RLV12, and no other/additional peripherials are supported on the Q-bus.

The FE runs RT-11, but normally a specific program is started at boot time, which manages the whole system. You can reboot the FE with a special switch to tell it to not run that program, and then you instead get to the normal RT-11 prompt, and can do the same things as on any RT-11 system. You can also run the FE application by hand at that point.

The FE is a VAX-86x0 specific board, so I'm not sure what peculiarities might be in the hardware, which this version of RT-11 is adapted to.

The Q-bus comes out of the 86x0 backplane on two flat cables, which goes into the expansion box.

	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