I have a PDP-11/34 programmer's console, what should I do with it?

--- Gunther Schadow <gunther(a)aurora.regenstrief.org> wrote: Always a nice choice if you can manage it. I don't have any spare regulators (I am, in fact, short one - missing caps from the previous owner and no expectation that the board works), but I do have a limited function panel sitting on the shelf - it has the BERG connector, *not* the 16-pin-DIP connector; probably why it's sitting there. None of my OMNIBUS boxes are wired to talk to it. I do have a 5.25" 11/34 in my basement right now, with a limited-function panel, but I'm not sure you can _put_ the programmer's panel on the short 11/34s. We always used ODT on it anyway (cf. recent discussion about force-feeding PDP-11s from a VAX via ODT and special console toggle switch - this one _is_ that PDP-11). The 11/34 should do for 2.9BSD. I haven't tried it there - memory tends to be a little tight. I _have_ loaded 2.9BSD on a loaded 11/24, some time ago, c. 1987, ISTR. I splurged on a KT24(?) from Terry Kennedy just so I could have more RAM. I had the memory cards, but I couldn't address them without it. I finally gave up on 2.9BSD on real -11 hardware when I couldn't manage to locate a disk larger than an RL02 that 2.9BSD supported (no MSCP). I didn't have any SMD disks available, and the only real choice would have been an RK611 with a bank of RK07 drives. I still haven't had any SMD or ESDI Unibus controllers cross my path in the past 15 years. All I have for Unibus disk is _still_ UDA50s and RL02s. I could install and run the base packages on a dual 10MB system, but there wasn't room for sources and to rebuild the kernel. 28MB would have done it though, I think. 56MB would have been sweet (we used to use a dual- RK07 configuration when we did compatibility testing with our product and 4.0BSD, 4.1BSD and SYSV in 1984/1985 on an 11/750 w/2MB of RAM). There's nothing intrinsically wrong with an 11/34, but they seem small to me. I guess it's better than an 11/04, and there certainly were a lot of 11/34s shipped, so they tend to be easier to find, in my experience, than other Unibus PDP-11s. I guess when you look at the 18-bits of address space on the Unibus, compared with 22-bits on anything Qbus -11s, the 11/34 _is_ kinda small. 256K is plenty for RT-11, but it gets a wee bit cramped, not for Unix itself, but for the way we are accustomed to using Unix. There's room for the kernel (if it's optimized for your hardware), but I don't recall wanting to try a second user under 2.9BSD and 256K of RAM. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/