Hardware vs Simh

Then obviously, we agree! Before the emulators were available, real DEC CPUs and other hardware was vitally important. I even became somewhat capable in regard to figuring our problems and putting systems together. One time, I even managed to assemble from switches, diodes, LEDs and resistors (along with a bit of wire and solder, of course) a front panel that would support what a 6 button front panel on a BA23 box has to support two MFM hard drives, including LEDs to display the WRITE PROTECT status of any floppy media in the RX50 drives. So I am not completely immune to the "Light Side" of the hardware. Since I have been writing programs for computers since 1960 (started with an IBM 650 using SOAP assembler), I am VERY aware that hardware has advanced far more than software. In fact, during the early years before operating systems with files and disk drives became available, the ONLY thing was hardware and the minimum software was only there to guide the single batch job at a time through the queue. The biggest single change was around 1966 when it became possible to support a large number of terminals which were able to EDIT online files which were then submitted as batch jobs to be executed one at a time. This allowed the shift from punched cards to online files to become possible. The system I worked on in 1967 was a CDC 3500 with a file structure that supported up to 6000 files residing on washing machine sized disk drives. But by 1980, DEC had developed and improved their operating systems and that software has finally started to become just as important as the hardware. Many others, including IBM had also started along those lines. In particular, CDC had an operating system for the 64 bit CPU, the STAR-100, which used virtual memory based in the 256 TerraByte address space. However, RT-11 finally became my focus, for many reasons, around 1980 and I don't think there has been a year since then, perhaps not even a month, that I have not run programs under that operating system. When Ersatz-11 was first released around 1995, it was rather limited and I used both real DEC CPUs and Ersatz-11 for a number of years. By 2002 when I upgraded to a 750 MHz Pentium III with 768 MB of memory and 40 GB hard drives, I started to used the PDP-11/83 less and less. What I still find so challenging is that even after 40 years, RT-11 still has a few bugs which crash the operating system and many bugs that need fixing. The basic structure of RT-11 is extremely solid and lends itself to many more enhancements that I ever would have believed. I have managed to enhance more than half of the SAV files and many of the device drivers along with the actual monitors, as well as writing new monitors such as SN(X).SYS, Symbolic Name List Pseudo Device Driver which does all of what PATH does for DOS. Recently, I have also enhanced the KED variants to support more than 24 lines and more than 132 columns. Jerome Fine