11 May
2016
11 May
'16
12:30 p.m.
From: Dave Wade
I have recently a PDP-11 which apparently came from a
VAX console.
If that's really where it came from, it's a QBUS 11/03. (And IIRC only the
780 had a PDP-11 console, although I'm not a VAX expert.)
It looks to me like there are two CPU's in there
Well, as Bill said, send us the 'M-numbers' (on the board handles), and we'll
tell you what you've got - but multi-CPU PDP11's basically don't exist (with
some rare exceptions), and certainly not in a VAX console. So I'm not sure
what you have there.
and Bus Terminator
Actually, that's the 'QBUS out' connector card; the way the PDP-11 runs the
VAX is that there's a card in the 780 CPU which is on the QBUS (there are
cables that run from the QBUS out to that card), and it allows the -11 to
totally control the 780 CPU.
I have done lots of searching and there doesn't
seem to be a simple
list of what can run on it
Well, nothing that needs memory management - at least, as it sits. You could
swap out the CPU card for an 11/23 or 11/73, then you could run an OS that
needs memory management (Unix, or one of the DEC OS's that needs it - I know
nothing of the DEC OS's for the -11, someone else here will, though). And
your backplane is probably so-called Q18, limited to 256KB of memory, but
that's easy to upgrade.
Noel