PDP 11/44 working

Yesterday (and into the night), I powered up one of the two 11/44 machines rescued from San Diego. Did the usual thing of taking out the cards, documenting cables, cleaning, dusting, and then turning things up slow and watching voltages - no worries, the systaem came up and was subsequently reassembled in it's as-acquired config. It boots from two Micropolis 51/4" half-height drives sitting in the card bay of a card-less 11/23 chassis... which has been re-badged by Centaur Software. The front panel switches control write-protect, now. I don't have models right now, since I didn't work on that device yet. But they connect to a Dilog DU686 controller card - a quad-height card with one common 34-pin ribbon and individual 20-pin ribbons going to each (of 2 drives). This is... MFM, no? the original owner called them SCSI but somehow I think not.... Anybody have Doc on this Dilog card? The machine currently runs RSX-11M V4.2 G Build 58, or so it says. File creations run from 1980 to 1997, when the machine was shut down. The physical devices are mostly from '79 to '83. It has Fortran, Basic, and Oregon Pascal V2 installed. There is an RL02 system, working nicely, and couple of multi-line EIA muxes, one DEC (M7819) DZ11 and a Ditronics 16-line EIA mux. There is also a Digital Pathways SLC-1 real-time clock/calendar that sits in the Console line and responds to certain interrogatories from the System... fairly funky, IMHO. It came with printsets for all major subsystems, and the Blue Wall, and about 20 RL02 packs, most of which are blank. If everything goes as planned, I will bring this machine to VCF5.0 and let it be Played With. And, looking back into the Files, it was Bill Bradford who first brought this machine to the attention of Chris Kennedy, who referred it to me, and voila! here it is warming my (pleasantly) chilly garage while we wait to see if Autumn is going to actually stay for a while. It was pushing 90 here this afternoon... wierd! Should be fixing to snow.... So - now to wake up the Second System. Since this was a mission-critical machine, there are actually two complete identically-configured 11/44a and disk subsystems. The RL02 is shared by changing cables to the machine in use, and the TTY lines are all hooked up to a bank of DPDT mini switches (also by Centaurus Software) so that, if one system crashes, the other can be cut over by changing one connector and flipping the switches. Anyway - not a particularly 'rare' or 'significant' system, but certainly fun to mess around with. It certainly gets stares from my nieghbors. One of the local kids looked in while it was running this evening and asked "what's *that* thing?". I told him it was a computer. "No Way!!" Cheers John