Loading software onto a real PDP11

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 4:50 PM, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove <captainkirk359 at gmail.com> wrote: No. It's a standalone application for use on bare metal on the target side. The "server" side is any modern machine that can compile a C program with certain I/O library requirements (not onerous), that can inject a small bootstrap to the target PDP-11 via ODT if available (or you can toggle in the bootstrap if ODT is not available) then via the bootstrap, the vtserver program can inject a pre-compiled PDP-11 client program that knows the vtserver protocol and knows a bit about common PDP-11 mass storage devices, so you can take 2BSD tape images and write them to disks on the PDP-11 side via the console serial port. The program is not so narrowly written that it's _only_ useful for 2BSD loading, but that was the purpose for which it was written. As mentioned elsewhere, the pre-compiled vtserver client uses the MUL instruction, so will only run on a target machine with EIS, and the client requires 192K of memory (reflecting back to the original purpose of installing 2BSD, it requires that and more, so these limitations aren't limitations for that use, only for use on smaller systems and other target operating systems). There are (at least) two threads going on here - one thread is "use VTSERVER", the other thread is "use the TU58 bootstrap and OS driver with a TU58 emulator that knows how to serve oversized TU58 images". -ethan