From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502(a)yahoo.com>
As others more qualified than I have said, there isn't a way to boot
RT-11 over an ethernet card;
True. However you can mop boot using DDCMP over serial or sync
lines but that is not supported by RT11 internally but it can load
the rt11 image that way.
I am, however, confident you can boot RT-11
over a TU-58 and a serial port. I have never done it (I've always used
floppies or a hard disk), but with the right bootstrap on the -11, it
I have, and do. it expects a standard DL device on one of several
likely addresses and uses RSP/MRSP (TU58 serial protocal).
shouldn't be a big deal. You could then bring up
your machine from an
emulated TU-58 (a DOS or Linux box, probably, or even VMS, with a little
There are programs for Linus or unix boxen and it's doable with VMS.
development work to port an emulator) and tape images.
It's a bit slow -
38400 bps is a standard transfer speed, but not as bad as the original
because you won't have enormous seek latency.
At 38.4 with a real tape the seeks are killer slow. With a tu58 simulator
it's remarkably fast and useable. Hint: boot rt11, install VM: and INIT VM:
then copy/boot DD to VM, then copy the core of RT11 to VM and boot
that. Then the slow tape is less an issue as swaps and commonly used
files are local to the ramdisk (VM:). Minimum ram for that is 256k
(VM:192k),
as usual more is better. With a 1 or 2Mb of ram VM: is quite large and the
effect is
a system that beats an RL02/RLV21 for performance. Most of this is
forgotten
by all but the most hardcore PDP-11 users and likely unheard of to the kids.
Also, it's possible to force-feed a bootstrap or
any other memory
tidbits down the console line and ODT. We used that technique to
test COMBOARDs when I was at Software Results - the rig was software
or to load the TU58 loader. ;)
Allison