pdp11/70 / MK11

Sure sounds like MK-11 to me. My last 11/70 service call was a year after I left DEC. Reminds me of the time I went on a TRW support call to Skokie to Grainger and found the techs working (for weeks) on an 11/70 running RSTS/E. They had a memory problem which got so bad they couldn't boot XXDP+. They claimed they swapped memory... and the controller. Well, these Vax trained weenies were dead in the water and the customer was hot... I asked for some error logs and ERRDIS printouts showed intermittant correctable memory errors back to Sept. (this was Jan.)... The folks had been swapping the cache. I toggled in 014747 @ 10000(is my memory correct) and found it failed on accesses to addresses with 2 and 6 as the last byte I moved the MK memory to one side of the box and it booted without interleaving... Case closed. Actual time less than an hour to get these guys on track. The techs also had down an RM05 an 11/34a which wouldn't boot RSX11/M. I just had 'em swap the RM05 and found a bad backplane in the 11/34a to get myself on a plane out of there for home. I decided not to make fun of DEC techs after working for the third party competition -- which was usually worse -- less training, less diags, less parts, less understanding and often less paid. These folks would get one or two of the better DEC guys and have em support a bunch of right out of tech school board swappers who were ok at the low end uPDP11's and LSI's -- and VAX systems -- but who choked bigtime on large 11's with diverse comm and real time device connectivity. The best DEC techs new the OS as well as the hardware... and could troubleshoot with both diags and scopes. AND COULD READ ERRORLOGS. Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? | Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow? | BSD: Are you guys coming, or what? -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? | Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow? | BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?