You wrote....
One final question before we dive into the logic. We
(or rather you) have
checked the power supply voltages at the backplane, right? Low supply
rails, or rails with ripple on them cause all sorts of 'interesting'
PDP11 problems.
Yup, checked the power regulators for level & ripple when I was
refurbishing
the racks. Actually, I checked them both at the regulator output and on the
backplane. But that was many months ago. I checked the 5v supply recently,
but the rest were months ago.
Jay