24 May
2011
24 May
'11
5:49 p.m.
On 5/24/11 5:18 PM, allison wrote:
I love that flexibility of the PDP-11 family.
I never did much PC stuff. I worked as a DOS apps developer (in
assembler, C, and Clipper, which is a dBase compiler) for a while, and
had a DOS machine at home. This was when 286/16 machines were current
and 286/20 and early 386/16 motherboards started appearing. I still had
the PDP-11 at home and used it, and later a MicroVAX, as my main
machine. My PC was primarily a terminal and a data-interchange machine
for the PDP-11 and (later) the VAX.
I'll get you for that! ;)
My only
experience with PDP-11 systems in production at work years ago
was multitasking, multiuser applications, so that's where my interests
lie. For single-user, single-tasking stuff, I'm a CP/M guy.
I did both single user applications oriented and as you describe multi
everything. Oddly often the same hardware just different OS. That said, I
do use RT11 quite a bit, but my primary PDP-11-related
interests lie with the "bigger" OSs and system configurations.
I can appreciate that. But I was doing the PC when the PC was still a
wannabe. RT11FB or XM gave me
a lot more than DOS. but a lot smaller (then) then VMS and the machines
it ran on. This is a
matter of point of view, yes...but from a RSTS/E and RSX-11M
point of view, not a "quadcore terabyte Interet connected 3dHD" point
of view. You should know me better than that by now.
;) leg pulled, yes! Dave, I could not resist! My comments were as much for those that have no idea,
where their life
didn't exist pre I386 or winders.
computing as we knew it took a big change in the early 90s.
Indeed, that would not be me. ;) I used PDP-11s at work (Princeton
University) at an after-school job that went full time after graduation,
then I became a commercial VMS sysadmin for a gaggle of MicroVAX-IIs,
IIIs, and an 11/750 at a Defense-related facility.
My first home computer was briefly an Atari 800, followed by an S-100
CP/M machine, followed a few months later by...you guessed it, a
PDP-11/34, running RSX-11M v4.1 and later RSTS/E v9.4. I ran the CP/M
machine and the PDP-11 together for a long time.
After that, I got a VAXstation-II/GPX and ran Ultrix as my main
platform. I sold the PDP-11/34 (but now have more) and I still have the
S-100 system.
I retired the VAXstation-II/GPX and moved to a Sun-3/50, then a
Sun-4/110, then a SPARCstation-1+, then an -IPX, all running SunOS 4,
then a string of SGI machines running IRIX, then MacOS X on the desktop
and Solaris on UltraSPARC in the datacenter, which is where I am now,
and will be for the foreseeable future.
I don't mind that a lot of people here never used these machines
before they started "collecting" them because they're "vintage".
However I DO become irritated when those people assume that everyone
here is in the same boat and only recently saw their first PDP-11. I'm
guessing that irritates you as well.
My other favorites was VMS and RSTS and RSX and even a
fun little OS
called Ultrix.
I still love Ultrix. I ran it as my main desktop OS (the
aforementioned VAXstation-II/GPX, four-plane VCB02 running in grayscale
mode) for a long time. It's a bit quirky compatibility-wise, but it's a
rock-solid OS.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL