Eric Smith wrote:
For the PDP-11
Qbus environment, DEC produced a
VT100 with a 4 x 4 Qbus backplane inside and named
it the VT103.
[...]
The point of the above information is that DEC
seems to
have used some of the popular (at the time) terminals to
be integrated as combination terminal and popular PDP
(Program Data Processor
The situation with the VT14 is *much* different than the VT103, though.
The VT103 is intended for use running PDP-11 software.
While the VT14 contains a PDP-8, it isn't intended for running PDP-8 software.
I am totally unfamiliar with the PDP-8, so my question
and observations could be entirely out of the ball park.
Although the VT14 was not intended to run PDP-8
software, was or would it have been possible? If
so, did that ever happen?
May computer systems were used for projects which
were totally unanticipated by the individuals or the
companies which produced the computer systems in
the first place. For example, my first contact with the
VT103 was as a diagnostic station which, although
the code was PDP-11 and there was a standard DEC
PDP-11 CPU, had the code on an EPROM and the
code was totally different from any other PDP-11
software that I have even seen. In addition, from
what I understand, all DEC variants of the VT103
arrived with an 18 bit backplane which, in my opinion,
resulted in a system that could be compared to a
human with an IQ of a shoe size. With only 256 KB
of memory available, there was almost never enough
memory for most anything that was significant. Since
upgrading the backplane to 22 bits was actually quite
simple, that made the primary difference when a J11
based CPU was installed.
Jerome Fine
