On Mar 5, 2021, at 7:22 PM, Johnny Billquist via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
Maybe this weekend I'll hack that SSD floppy
thingie and load up the P/OS 3.2 disks to see how that works.
Can't run split I/D space on any version of P/OS. Neither does it support supervisor
mode. Also, the J11 on the Pro-380 is running a bit on the slow side. Rather sad, but I
guess they didn't want to improve the support chips on the Pro, which limited speed,
and they didn't want to start having Pro software that didn't run on all models,
which prevented the I/D space and supervisor mode.
In the end I would probably just put it down to additional ways DEC themselves crippled
the Pro, which otherwise could have been a much better machine.
The most embarassing blunder with the Pro is that the bus supports DMA, but no I/O cards
use it. Even though a bunch of them should have -- hard disk controller obviously,
network adapter possibly as well.
I/D and supervisor mode work fine on RSTS. :-)
The explanation I heard for the slow J-11 clock is that the original J-11 spec called for
it to operate at 20 MHz. When Harris failed to deliver and the max useable clock speed
ended up to be 18 MHz, most designs had no trouble. But the Pro support chips were
designed to run synchronous with the CPU clock and for various other reasons needed a
clock frequency that's a multiple of 10 MHz, so when 20 MHz was ruled out that left 10
MHz as the only alternative.
I would have liked better comms. The USART has such a tiny FIFO that you can't run it
at higher than 9600 bps even with the J-11 CPU. At least not with RSTS; perhaps a lighter
weight OS can do better. The printer port is worse, that one can't run DDCMP reliably
at more than 4800 bps. I normally run DDCMP on the PC3XC, which is a 4-line serial card
that uses two dual UART chips (2681?) with reasonable FIFO.
paul