25 Feb
2003
25 Feb
'03
10:54 a.m.
--- Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
True, but serial terminals were not common when the PDP-11/10 was
being sold new. In the DEC world, it was the day of ASR-33s and
parallel line printers on the low end. Five years later, serial
printers were much more common (LA-36 and newer).
> --- pavl <pzachary(a)sasquatch.com> wrote:
> (you DO have a second slu?)
>
> On a machine that old? Unlikely. Machines of the era before the
DZ-11,
and especially
machines that were not destined for timesharing, tended
to have few serial ports...
Serial pots were used for things other than terminals... Many printers
had serial interfaces, as did the TU58 (which is what started this
discussion). While timesharing was rare on machines without memory
managemnt, it was
not uncommon to have 3 or 4 serial ports in such machines.
Again, my experiences in the DEC world are that Unibus RT-11-class
machines ( less than 28KW of RAM, one or two disk devices, no MMU )
tended not to have multiple DL-11s. I'm not saying it never happened,
it just wasn't common. It was much more common when the low end
switched to the Qbus platforms.
Be warned that the DL11 (simple serial port) and the
DZ11 (etc --
'multiplexer' serial ports) look very different in software! Older OSes
may well only support the former.
True. Good call. I have never used a DZ-11 under any version of
RT-11 and have no idea how it would work out. I have used DZ-11s
with RSTS and RSX. Works great.
-ethan