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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-05-17 20:51, Clem Cole wrote:

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:

      Unibus VAXen basically means VAX-11 machines. They booted either
      from VMB on console media, or (for the 11/750) from a boot block. No
      network capabilities there. They could not even boot from tape.


Amen, and seemingly hard to believe.     It seems so primitive by today's
standards.   But it actually makes sense.   Disks in those days were a
huge expense within the total system price, but definitely part of it.
A system in the Vax class really needed to be self-supporting.     So the
concept of it not have local storage would have been strange and frankly
not able to be sold.

Let's also not forget that in those days Ethernet HW was not
particularly cheap either.     The 3Com stinger taps cost about $500 each,
and that did not include the $~2-3K for the 3Cxxx for the Unibus.

Well, in all honesty. We did just cover network booted PDP-11s. Not to mention that PDP-11s could boot from tape pretty much from day 1.

On the other hand, VAXen (as well as PDP-11) came out on the market before Ethernet existed.

However, later VAXen definitely supported network booting, as well as totally being diskless. But those were not using the Unibus. :-)

	Johnny