we have a heath h11 which is lsi 11 aka pdp 11/03
the drives are not rx o1 or rx o2... but are they and the controller
comparable? with rx01 or an rx02?
Thanks Ed# at smecc
Hi,
I recently acquired a pair of HP 2100A minicomputers locally for very
cheap. Don't think I could get much more local that a guy literally at the
end of my street. He bought them at an auction over ten years ago, never
powered them on, and left them in his garage since. They've likely never
been powered up since they were last in regular use. The units seem to be
complete, apart from missing a few I/O cards that are written onto the top
of the power supply. I don't plan to power them up until I've taken them
apart, cleaned all the dirt and debris from them, and inspected the power
supply.
With regards to the power supply, I'm thinking my best bet would be to do a
power on with no cards in the system. Though I'm not sure if all the power
rails would even come up without a load on it, since it sounds like it may
do some power sequencing from what I've read. I was wondering if anyone has
some experience with testing a similar power supply that hasn't been run in
at least 10 years?
I'm not sure if using a variac to slowly warm up the supply and the caps
would be wise on one of these power supplies. I'm not sure how the
switching supplies would handle the low voltage at the start.
The only I/O card that was installed in both machines, besides a terminator
board in only one of them, is a serial interface made by some company with
the logo CMC. It uses a COM2502 UART which I was surprised to find a
datasheet for, however I haven't found any information on the card itself.
I have a photo of the card in the album linked below if anyone has any
information on it.
I know this email is getting a bit long, but with regards to the memory
both machines have a ID(16K) driver board, and two core modules. However
one machine has both core modules marked 02100-60052 on the bridge, and the
other has one marked 02100-60052 and the other 02100-60054. Is there any
difference between these modules? I'd assume by the 16K driver in both,
that all of the core modules are 8KW modules. Would that just be a later
revision or is one a different size?
I've taken some photos of the machines and put them here:
https://goo.gl/photos/z2tGBbNvekwrxS5L9
I'll be taking more after I make some space to start taking the units apart
for cleaning and inspection. I've also included photos of the serial
numbers and other badges on the backs if anyone knows of a resource to
decode them.
I'd very much appreciate any help or suggestions that people have. I really
want to get at least one of these machines back into full working order to
have some fun programming with.
Thanks,
Hayden K.
I realise this is a bit of a long shot, but does anyone have the driver
CD "GIO Fast Ethernet 1.0 for Irix 5.3 and 2.0 for Irix 6.2", SGI part
number 812-0576-001?
This is the drivers for SGI's own Fast Ethernet card, not the
Phobos/3Com ones.
--
Pete
Pete Turnbull
I am trying to preserve data from a selection of 8inch disks and the only information I have is some printouts which I believe to be HP CAT reports.
The first couple of lines are as follows
NAME PRO TYPE REC/FILE BYTES/REC ADDRESS
H8,0,1 148
ALT-A DATA 1 1188 0/1/0
Can anyone answer the following questions?
Is this an HP CAT report?
What does the H8,0,1 mean?
Is it likely that there are 1188 bytes/rec?
What does the address 0/1/0 resolve to?
Any information would be most welcome
Denise de Vries
________________________________
Rich - correct. That is the disc we have here.
Just wondering in case We ever got a pdp-8 with disc interface or a
standard unibus PDP 11 here at SMECC . We have an 11/20 but of
course not much memory and no disc controller so it sits.
Ed# _www.smecc.org_ (http://www.smecc.org)
In a message dated 8/3/2016 3:51:20 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
rich.cini at verizon.net writes:
Are you referring to having the H-27 drive from Heath? I don't know for
sure because I've never seen H27 docs, but the disk capacity is the same as
the RX01 (256k) and I think the interface was made deliberately
incompatible, likely at the behest of DEC. The version of RT-11 (called HT-11)
supposedly used a different floppy device driver.
Again, this is based solely on what I've read from various places and not
direct experience (I have an H-11 with a SCSI controller; no floppy; and it
runs RT-11 no problem).
Rich
Sent from my iPhone
> On Aug 3, 2016, at 1:40 AM, COURYHOUSE at aol.com wrote:
>
> we have a heath h11 which is lsi 11 aka pdp 11/03
>
> the drives are not rx o1 or rx o2... but are they and the
controller
> comparable? with rx01 or an rx02?
>
> Thanks Ed# at smecc
> From: Paul Koning
> It would have to be a Unibus bridge type device, i.e., it terminates
> the Unibus from the CPU, and at the other end originates a Unibus with
> mapped addresses on it.
Oh, right you are - I hadn't worked that out. (Probably because my head
is still full of KT24 stuff, which doesn't have two totally separated
busses. :-)
> That assumes the KT11-B does only memory mapping, not the other things
> that other MMUs do (user vs. kernel mode, I/D space .. ).
I don't think it can; those would require hooks into the CPU, and there are
no signs of such, in the pictures.
Noel
On Aug 3, 2016 3:10 AM, "Peter Coghlan" <cctalk at beyondthepale.ie> wrote:
>
> >
> > Also, the built in SCSI on a VAX 3100 doesn't support drives over 1GB.
> >
>
> That's not quite correct.
>
Yeah, more details than I could be 100% accurate about off the top of my
head and had the patience to type with one thumb.
The only point was to mention that if some systems have issues with SCSI
drives due to their capacity alone you can usually soft resize the drive
smaller. No need to pay a premium for older SCSI drives of 1GB native
capacity or smaller.
> From: Steven Malikoff
> I'm wondering if there are any more differences apart from the lack of
> the two high address switches?
According to the -11/15-20 processor manual (pg. 2), the differences between
the two are i) the -15 has only one hardware interrupt level, not four (the
latter is optional), and ii) power-fail restart is an option, not standard.
> Presumably the /15 could not run one of those KT-11 paging units
I'm not sure how the KT11-B works, but my _suspicion_ (going from the
pictures of that one that sold on eBay) is that it's not part of the CPU, but
a UNIBUS device, which maps part of the UNIBUS which the CPU _can_ see (i.e.
in the 0-56KB range) up to higher addresses, where the 'extra' memory is
configured. If that supposition is correct, it would work equally well on any
-11 (without built-in memory mapping in the CPU).
Noel
A few months back you might recall the road trip I did to recover a Foxboro FOX-2, a rebadged
PDP-11 that ran the furnace oxygenation plant at the BHP steel mill at Port Kembla here in Oz
during the 1970s.
I had thought the machine was an 11/20 with a custom FOX front panel that (apart from the
Foxboro lime green colour trim) had only 16 address switches instead of the 18 found on that
machine, and that there might be two more vacant switch locations on the front panel PCB
to be found lurking underneath when it came time to disassembling.
But having just seen the PDP-11/15 up on eBay, I now believe that is what the FOX-2 really is.
This page (http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11/20) reckons the /15 is just an OEM version of the
/20 but I'm wondering if there are any more differences apart from the lack of the two high
address switches? (Presumably the /15 could not run one of those KT-11 paging units as was
seen on that recent eBay 11/20)
Steve.