PDP-11/34 Progress Report

I've made some progress with my PDP-11/34. Since last week's PSU corn-fusion, I pulled all the cards, air-dusted them, air-dusted and inspected the backplanes, took an inventory of jumper and DIP switch settings, put a minimal CPU+mem+console card set in, connected the backplanes to the PSU, and turned on the machine. It was a little more complicated than that, but I've got what seems to be a working 11/34 in my living room. Learned: As I had mentioned previously, my M9312 had a strange start address dialed into its DIP switches by one of the previous owners. That has to be a mistake. When the machine boots, it immediately halts. If I manually start the processor at the correct address for the console emulator, I get a steady run light. I do not have a console terminal attached yet. Learned: A previous owner had a rocker-style DIP switch block on the console DL11-W set backwards (i.e. one's complement of the correct setting). The DL11-W was being configured with the wrong interrupt vector. Learned: If you plug in a G727A bus grant card backwards, the processor will not halt. :-) To do: My only existing cable that plugs into a DL11-W is for 20mA current loop. I have a current loop VT52 that I haven't yet tested. I'll see if I can do that tomorrow. After all, it would be nice to know if the register printout is actually occurring. It's so late it's early; therefore, I should go to bed. Tomorrow I'll run some test programs! -- Jeffrey Sharp