[HECnet] Questions about the E11 version 0.9 release

[John Wilson]

From: Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com>

In going over my collection of things PDP-11 I came across a some what
startling discovery. That of this one, I have nearly all the releases
of E11 from the 0.8 one all the way to the recent one.

Nice!   The bloating of the executable gets pretty embarrassing if you go
back far enough (it takes almost no code to boot RT-11 as an 11/34a -- the
other half-megabyte of flab is for ... well it must be for *something* ...).

Now I've gone and read all or nearly all of the documentation file
that it came with. There are two instructions there, one of is the
SWITCH one, and I quote here:

Unless I've gone senile (how would I know?), that flavor of that command
is still present in the latest DOS and stand-alone versions too.

And of course my question is one of, were those actually tested with
real hardware attached?

I never built an ISA board to do it.   I had intended to, and I was going to
drill a blank 5.25" drive bay cover for LEDs and toggle switches, but then
I got the idea for the LPT-port hack with software muxing which does the
display part with way less hardware, so I never bothered.   But I did test
it with a random device or two to convince myself it was working correctly
(reads and writes PC regs OK).

Doing a PCB layout for an ISA lights-n-switches board would take a weekend
at most so I'd be happy to do it, if anyone cared.   Doesn't Bob Armstrong
already make something better though?   Anyway at this point I think USB is
the way to go so that's about item #117 on my to-do list.

John I imagine you are aware that these early releases are floating
all over the Internet?

Yep, which is kind of sweet!   And they're from before I decided to have a
go at making a living with PDP-11s, so they don't have any restrictions on
commercial use.   Lots of very embarrassing bugs, but that'll always be true.

John Wilson
D Bit