17 Jul
2023
17 Jul
'23
11:42 a.m.
On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 at 13:06, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 at 12:59, Ethan Dicks via cctalk
<
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
That seems to have worked perfectly. Thank you for the utility and the
explanation. Now off to working on the next steps!
-Henry
A brief follow-up on this: After lots of (virtual) disk-swapping I was able
to upgrade an existing 1.0 system but was not able to install a 1.2 system
from scratch. It seems that there is some sort of bootloader issue with a
clean install, which I suspect might be a SIMH problem and I will follow up
there after some more investigation.
I truly feel for the folks who had to do this at the time, using 38
floppies on a MicroVAX I. The installer does give time estimates for
certain milestones so that you could go and get a coffee or whatever.
"Configuring vmunix, this takes about 30 minutes" is certainly indicative
of the relative speed of the machine at the time. Also there is an
indication that there was a tape distribution but so far that has not
surfaced. I'm not even sure what medium that would have been - RC25?
From: http://www.chdickman.com/pdp11/pro380.txt
"The RX50 floppy starts at track 1. Track 0 is logically placed after
track 79. The sectors are interleaved 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8,
10. The track shift and interleave must be taken into account when
moving disks between real PDP-11 and emulators."
I have had good luck with a secfor convolver from the same page as this
comment:
http://www.chdickman.com/pdp11/lbn2rx50.c
It will go both ways, to and from physical block order and logical block
order.