25 Feb
2003
25 Feb
'03
11:38 a.m.
Serial pots
were used for things other than terminals... Many printers
had serial interfaces, as did the TU58 (which is what started this
discussion).
True, but serial terminals were not common when the PDP-11/10 was
being sold new. In the DEC world, it was the day of ASR-33s and parallel line printers on the low end. Five years
later, serial
printers were much more common (LA-36 and newer).
These machines were in use for a lot longer than 5 years (or at least
the ones I've resched were...). It was not uncommon for them to have
serial ports added later.
While timesharing was rare on machines without
memory managemnt, it was
not uncommon to have 3 or 4 serial ports in such machines.
Again, my experiences in the DEC world are that Unibus RT-11-class
machines ( less than 28KW of RAM, one or two disk devices, no MMU )
tended not to have multiple DL-11s. I'm not saying it never happened,
it just wasn't common. It was much more common when the low end
switched to the Qbus platforms.