30 Jun
2023
30 Jun
'23
4:39 p.m.
So I had a fellow list member show up and trade me an AUI cable for
reading some of his old RX01/02 disks to see if there was anything on
them. Not a big deal, TALOS (my 11/83) has pretty much everything:
11/83 CPU board with FPJ11
MSV11-QD card with 4mb memory (lots o' disk cache)
RXV21 plus RX02 drive
RLV12 plus two RL02 drives (and an RL01 in a pinch)
TQK70 and TK70 tape drive
DELQA Ethernet
DZQ11 4 port serial board
And the MTI ESDI disk controller with a 330mb half height ESDI disk
Overall it's a pretty fast and solid system. I have RT11 on DU4:, RSXM+
on DU0:, and plenty of power to do anything.
However when we fired it up we got nothing on the terminal. Great. So I
went to TITAN, which is another BA23 equipped 11/73 with:
11/73-B board wo FPJ11
2mb memory (Datamation)
TQK70+TK50 (my other TK70 doesn't write properly for some God unknown
reason)
DEQNA Ethernet (it works)
DHV11 8 port serial board
That odd little 3016 real time clock board I never seem to get around to
loading drivers for
RQDX3 jumpered for RD54 running RSX11M+ (not bad with cache)
20mb HH drive with XXDP+ utils
40mb HH drive with RT11 5.4 all drivers (last version that supports the
TU58)
That worked, we were able to move over the RXV21 and read the disks, but
I was wondering what was wrong with my main system. So after he left I
pulled it apart.
Problem seems to be the MTI card was not booting up properly, and since
it holds the Q bus in a frozen state until the disk spins to ready it
was blocking the system. Pulled it, cleaned the pins with 1500 grit
sandpaper, put it back in, it now works. Great.
So every once in awhile I guess I have to check the pins on these old
11's. They run well and are starting to be used more, but they still
have weird problems from time to time.
CZ