[HECnet] LSSM group visit today

[Dave McGuire]

On 11/16/21 11:23 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> Hey, I didn't have any information about FANG::

   We have many nodes defined here that come up on HECnet when they're 
up.  FANG:: is 61.5.

> Should I put it as a real PDP-11/70 then? What OS is it running when on 
> HECnet?

   Sure.  It currently only runs RSX-11M-PLUS v4.6, but eventually we'll 
set up RSTS/E, RT-11, and 2.11BSD system disks for it.  I suppose the 
only other one that will appear on HECnet is RSTS/E.  The goal for that 
machine, with its quad pack of RA73s, is to cover most of the OSs that 
people may want to run.

   Another you can add is PIXEL::, at 61.22, which is a PDP-11/83 (real 
hardware) that runs RSX-11M-PLUS most of the time.  That's at my place, 
not at the museum.  I usually run it through the winter; I brought it up 
last week.

   I will formalize the others and get you the info as time permits.

> (And it's always fun to see people actually use these machine in the 
> proper way...)

   Yes. :)  When I was a kid in the early 1980s, it was a huge fantasy 
of mine to be the admin of a PDP-11 with users on it.  As I grew up that 
became less and less of a possibility, but I was the admin of a few 
VAXen running VMS in the late 1980s into the early 1990s.  And then of 
course UNIX systems with many thousands of users.

   And of course we run PDP-11s and do group tours at the museum all the 
time, for six years now.  But yesterday, with a group tour in which 
everyone was doing pretty much the same thing on the same machine, was 
very different, and finally fulfilled that old fantasy of mine.

   The only thing that would've made it better, but only a little, is if 
those terminals were connected to DH11s.  They're all connected to 
DECservers and their sessions were via LAT.  We can't really dedicate 
terminals to machines at LSSM, because there are many more machines than 
terminals.

   Not even consoles are dedicated.  All of the consoles (even the 
PDP-8s) are connected to DECserver ports with local services defined, so 
people can run any kind of terminal they want on a give machine.

             -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA