13 Nov
2005
13 Nov
'05
7:09 p.m.
Subject: Re: Was Ultrix for DECstations -- now DEC advances
From: Bill Pechter <pechter at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:01:20 -0500
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you
could still buy it now!
pechter-at-gmail.com
DEC always had stuff that was easy for the end user.
Not always for the
programmer (TKB taskbuilder comes to mind...) TKB had more options than
EMACS had special keystrokes.
TKB was strange and wonderful.
I never did get along much with RSX as more than a
user. Coding under
RT11 was great and RSTS/E Basic Plus was slick.
RT-11 is my favorite PDP-11 OS and I have it for all my 11s. RSTS/E
is one I used and liked.
Multiuser Basic on RT11 was slick.
Never used it. Would have liked to.
I had 4 terminals off a PDT11/150
supplying different functions... Program input on one, console on
another, monitor of memory on a third, serial printer on another. In
60kb of memory. There's a PDT11/150 selling on Ebay now.
I thought about it but the storage was too limiting.
I have a PDT11/130 (tu58 in a vt100). sloooow. Fun!
Rumor has it some hacker at DEC took the signals off
the bus and was
working on a hard disk that would look like an RK or something like an RL.
I can believe it. IDE is a simple interface and can be made to look
like most anything with a brain dead 8048.
My favorite small 11 is a BA11VA shoebox with 11/23, 256kb ram, DLV11J
and MRV11(boot proms) with a TU58 emulator (8051 and for 128kx8 rams)
that is faster than the real tu58 and run RT-11 XM with bas RT11 in VM:
Thankyou for
that! Some of the things I was used to at DEC I still haven't
found a PC version that is close. If there ever was one that would be
VAXNotes, really great collaboritive tool.
Anyone ever do a wintel editor (NOT WORD) that had a single key for advance
cursor one word?
Hell. I want a Decmate box just for WPS... I've got WPS-80... but I'd love gold-key word
processing on Windows...
ME TOO!
One time I tried getting SmallEDT up on CP/M 80...to
give me EDT on CP/M.
Yucky. For CP/M I have VEDIT and thats as clost to EDT ot VAXedt as
you can get. In command mode the same teco macros run. It's configurable
so a VT100 keypad does the expected EDT stuff.
Never got the PC version but it was supposed to be the same thing.
The wife was amazed how easy WPS was to learn for an
untrained novice at
the keyboard. Wordstar was hell and WordPerfect required all the
special keyboard overlays...
My partner also like WPS still and uses PCs all day. She was also a
former digit and learned the DM/wps first and found the PC was crude.
Allison