21 Apr
2016
21 Apr
'16
10:31 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 9:41 PM, Jerome H. Fine <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> wrote:
Sounds like a sweet little system... in 1987, I was using an 11/23 in
a BA11N (5.25"-tall rack-mount box) with RX02 and RLV11+RL01, so
packing all that, including the 5MB disk into a VT103 would have been
quite nice.
william degnan
wrote:
Prior to the DEC Rainbow, Chrislin Industries was marketing the 11/23 with
vt103 as a desktop computer. This is a 3rd party vendor. Maybe they
were on to something...
Back around 1988, one of my customers had a few VT103
systems with just an RX02 for storage. A 3rd party
controller for an MFM drive (ST506 or DEC RD51) was
added since the DEC RQDX1 took too much power. There
was still sufficient power and room to place the
ST506 drive inside at the base of the VT103. Prior to that point, I had a VT103 with just 256 KB
of memory and a DSD 880/8 which had an 8 GB hard
drive / RX03 floppy drive in an external box. So
there were other 3rd party solutions as well.
8MB? But otherwise, also nice.
At one point, just to say that I had done so, I
placed
a quad PDP-11/73 CPU along with 4 MB of memory, an ESDI
controller and a DHV11 with 8 serial ports into the
backplane of a VT103.
Now you're talking!
I had to power the three 600 MG
hard drives from an additional PC power supply since
there was insufficient power from the VT103.
Sure.
But that
demonstrated that just a 4 x 4 Qbus backplane was
sufficient to run an extremely powerful PDP-11 system
using the VT103 as a base system with its own console
terminal.
Yep. The biggest limitation was power, the second was limited number
of slots, so you needed small but powerful cards to make it
worthwhile.
At one point, I heard that someone even
managed to make the first two slots ABCD which allowed
a MicroVAX II to be used instead
Wow. That sounds like a fun but much bigger hack.
I have a VT103 (w/TU58)... I did set up a simple 11/23 in it once, but
I should see what I can do with a SCSI card...
-ethan