[HECnet] Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-05-17 21:45, Clem Cole wrote:

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net
<mailto:b4 at gewt.net>> wrote:

      How were the VAX BSDs installed then?   Standalone bootloader on a
      floppy?


Often - that was the way.     There were TU58 tapes and floppies from
Evans Hall that can with your 4.1BSD tapes that did the cold boot.   That
code contained enough of a system to talk to the tape drive.

It would make sense. But I never saw such a thing with the MtXinu dist I had, which forced me to type the code in that was in the manual. :-)
Maybe it got lost/mislaid or MtXinu differed...

Before Kriddle and Asa would form MtXinu, a bunch of us in Cory Hall
hacked to a raw boot system, and I do not remember why.   IIRC it was Asa
Romberger that did that hack, and he might have done it originally for
IngVax.       I do remember Bob would come to test it on one of my 780's
(Sprite - aka UCBCAD) because we have newer/fancier/self threading
9-tracks with vacuum columns (model number escapes me) than we had in Evan.

Most likely a TU77 (800/1600 bpi) or TU78 (1600/6250 bpi) in that case.

	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