PDP11/23+ goes on

On 6/18/05, Philipp Hachtmann <hachti at hachti.de> wrote: I did say not to mount a pack that had crashed... that's completely expected. Yes. It's a non-system boot block. There are several techniques... if you are trying to load, say, 2BSD, there's vtserver. If you are trying to run an RT-11 system, you can hook up a PC to a serial port _other than the console_ and fire up a TU58 emulator on the PC and boot _that_ on the PDP-11 (DD). As others have suggested, the one that's low-effort is to locate/buy/etc/ a Qbus MSCP controller - $200 to $250 might do it, and use something like a ZIP drive. You could load it up on a PC, then stick it on the PDP-11 and boot DU and there you are. Most PDP-11 operating systems you'll probably want to play with were not loaded from paper tape like the PDP-8 was in the 1960s - I know you can build OS/8 from paper tape. I doubt it was ever done with RT-11. Most folks by that era had some sort of mass storage. On the low end, that was TU58 or RX01. If you had a few grand, you could move up to an RK05 or RL01 (2MB-5MB). When I got into PDP-8s and PDP-11s, c. 1982-1984, the RL02 cost more than my car, so I had to content myself with lower-capacity devices. Dunno what's up with your Emulex controller. Never had one. It's possible that whatever software was on there once has been corrupted. It should take seconds to boot (or nearly instantaneously to see the first messages). If I had a system device that sat and blinked lights for 10 minutes, I'd be looking for a way to mount it on a known good system as a data disk and start poking around. -ethan