Mentec

Rod Smallwood wrote:

Well that's interesting... It would seem that as long as Mentec choose to ignore non-commercial use you can do (within reason) what you like. I did say pdp preserver as opposed to RT, RSX or RSTS preserver. However I must admit to having worked in digital SWS and to having been part of the VMS marketing group I do have an interest in the software side.

DEC were quite keen on educational computing and that's how they would have viewed a hobbyist program. As HP now effectivly own what was DEC I assume the agreement is now between them and Mentec.

It seems that many efforts to set up a hobbyist (or collectors program) have come to nought due to Mentec seeing no profit in the arrangement.

Needless to say as a DEC hardware collector a simulator is of no interest to me.

Jerome Fine replies: First of all, please remember I am ONLY interested in RT-11. And while I have had contact with and used a bit of RSX-11 and a very extensive amount of RSTS/E, I was never responsible of a system which ran RSX-11 or RSTS/E. Which is the primary reason that I never became proficient enough to maintain either an RSX-11 or a RSTS/E system. On the other hand, I may now know RT-11 as well as some of the top RT-11 developers knew RT-11 during the 1980s. As for why Mentec no longer actively supports any of the PDP-11 systems, I venture to guess that it is no longer profitable. Mentec has helped the poor PDP-11 preservers. Unfortunately, it is not obvious since the help is more in not causing those poor PDP-11 preservers any difficulties as opposed to being proactive by making the operating systems generally available such as Borland products are at present. Also an example is the VMS hobby program which Mentec does not have. In addition, as others have mentioned in their replies, it seems very doubtful that Mentec really did "totally own" the PDP-11 operating systems. Unfortunately, it seems highly probable that the terms of the agreement between Mentec and DEC required the parties to maintain confidentiality since I can't see why those terms have never been publicly disclosed - unless those terms were so detrimental to the users that neither party wanted to admit the mistakes in the lack of a PDP-11 hobby program in the face of the VMS hobby license program. But what did happen did, what did not happen did not - the stories and interpretations that many of us make up about what happened are probably 90% fiction and are no longer even important. BUT, Mentec did make older versions of the operating systems available for legal non-commercial use under what was at the time a DEC owned emulator. It certainly seemed questionable at the time and it may be even more questionable at present, but Mentec has chosen to make no challenge to the use of those older versions of the operating systems under the current name of that DEC emulator which has evolved to become SIMH. In addition, Mentec also seems to be ignoring the legal requirement for a transfer of any operating system license to the new owner of any old PDP-11 hardware so long as, at least as far I can interpret, the new owner is non-commercial. Certainly there have been numerous discussions on classiccmp (one is going on right now about a single RL02 system) over PDP-11 use of the RT-11 operating system (i.e. NOT under SIMH) and I can't remember any recent protests from Mentec in this regard. Any finally, while the RSX-11 and RSTS/E operating systems are much more tightly controlled and not very easily available, almost 10 years ago, Megan Gentry, a former RT-11 developer, put a zip file of V05.03 of RT-11 up for general download with the explicit permission of the individuals who had to provide that permission. V05.03 of RT-11 is the last binary distribution allowed under the DEC emulator and by inference under SIMH. There is also a CD version (an ISO file) which contains as many as possible of the RT-11 binary versions as could reasonably be found for all of V05.03 of RT-11 and prior. Any for those individuals who are legally licensed to run the latest version of RT-11, V05.07 released in October of 1998 or just under 9 years ago, there is also a CD containing the rest of the RT-11 binary distributions. The latter CD was requested by a university who was legally licensed to use and already had a copy of V05.07 of RT-11 and was legally entitled to a backup of all of the RT-11 binary distributions. So - I don't really think that there are any "poor pdp preservers" as far as RT-11 is concerned. In point of fact, I have personally found ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in the last 5 years in: (a) Preserving RT-11, (b) Fixing any bugs in RT-11 (c) Making any enhancements in RT-11 Of course, for individuals in the know, most of them already have sufficiently preserved what they want of RT-11. On the other hand, even though I have made a number of vital bug fixes to RT-11 (for problems that crash RT-11) along with other minor problems as well as some extensive enhancements, I have yet to find anyone who is even interested in a Y3K for RT-11, let alone someone who would be interested in participating. Of course, Y3K may already have been done, the enhancements that I have already completed may have been duplicated along with many other enhancements and the bugs fixed as well and distributed to the users of RT-11. Perhaps I just don't know that it has all occurred without a word of it reaching my eyes and ears. But, as a result, I have place (a), (b) and (c) into a lower priority and focused on attempting something even less useful, i.e. confirming the value of pi(10^18) using a sieve program running under RT-11 with a view to attempting to determine pi(10^24). When I find that it will take a million years to finish the calculations for pi(10^24) with current computers, I may shift back to (a), (b) and (c) if I can't find something even less useful than knowing the value for pi(10^24). On the other hand, if anyone is really interested, drop me a line. If anyone really knows why Mentec does not have a hobby program for PDP-11 operating systems, let us know. Just don't complain about RT-11 and Mentec since nothing that Mentec seems to be doing at present interferes with "poor pdp preservers" as far as RT-11 is concerned. In 16 more years, which will be 25 years after V05.07 of RT-11 was released, I very seriously doubt that Mentec will care if every hobby user who wants a copy of V05.07 of RT-11 is using it on real DEC hardware, let alone if there is a running emulator on what goes for a PC in the year 2023 when I will be 84 years old if I am still kicking. As for commercial sites still running RT-11, if they don't already have the Y2K compliant V05.07 of RT-11, then I very much doubt that they will require V05.07 in the year 2023. And if those commercial sites are managing with the current bugs in RT-11 9 years after V05.07 was released, well ... Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.