PDP-11/73 booting!

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of David Betz Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 6:54 PM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: PDP-11/73 booting! Well, I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that I was unable to fix my RL01 cable. I tried a few approaches to reconnect the pins I could see were disconnected and wasn't able to get it to work. However, the good news is that I was able to acquire another cable and that fixed the problem entirely. In fact, the PDP-11/73 booted off the RL01 pack the first time I powered it up. I have three packs and was able to read all of them. One contains RT-11 V5.5, another is a TSX-Plus system disk but appears just to boot RT-11SJ. It does have lots of files on it with ".tsx" extensions but doesn't seem to boot TSX. The third is a blank scratch pack. I'm now in the market for a cable and breakout panel (cab kit?) for my RQDX3 controller so that I can connect an ST225 drive and an RX50 floppy drive to my 11/73. I know it's possible to build one of these but from my experience with attempting to fix the RL01 cable, I don't think I want to tackle that project. If someone has a cable and breakout panel they'd like to sell please get in touch with me. Anyway, thanks to everyone who has given me help with this machine. I now have a working PDP-11/73 with 1.5mb of memory, an RX02 floppy drive and an RL01 hard drive and it's all working!