4 Feb
2002
4 Feb
'02
8:48 a.m.
Bruce Ray wrote:
Is TSX-11 or TSX-11/Plus still available for
non-commercial purposes? The S
& H web site shows no info on this product.
Bruce Ray
>From: "R. D. Davis" <rdd(a)rddavis.org>
> Of course, just using RT-11 alone can become a little boring rather
> quickly, which is why adding TSX-Plus to it, or installing RSX-11
> instead, is a good idea ...unless you need to do real-time
> processing. :-)
Jerome Fine replies:
(a) As far as I know, there are no hobby versions, as yet, for TSX-PLUS.
However, if there is enough interest, perhaps we could inquire. I would
certainly be willing to contact S&H to see if they might be interested.
Since I was a sort of distributor for S&H at one point and I already have
my own license, I would be able to support hobby users. SO!!!! Are
there any potential TSX-PLUS hobby users out there who would like
to have this software?
(b) As for RT-11, I don't find it boring at all. In fact, since it is rare that
a single hobby user can make much use of the ability to multi-program
under TSX-PLUS, I find that I can gain 95% of the benefits that
TSX-PLUS offers (like having 64 KBytes of address space for a
program) to already be available right under RT-11. Of course, RT-11
still has a few bugs left and they are rather interesting to fix just for
themselves. As for being able to use more than one job at a time,
about the only use I have for that is to run multiple versions of KED.
That is one thing that even RT-11 can do extremely well - I do a
multi-terminal SYSGEN. On a real PDP-11, I use a number of
VT100/VT220/VT320 terminals (actually 6 in all). On a PC with
E11, one VT100 is usually enough connected to COM2: and the
other 4 jobs running KED can use the <ALT>/<Fn> keys to switch
between CONn: displays. That leaves the Background job free to
run all the other programs, although on some occasions I do run
a job via "SET TT: CONSOL=n" and have SDX.SYS running in
hardware mode on the PC monitor. That keeps SD: out of the job's
output on the VT100 beside me.
(c) Since E11 arrived, I do most of my development on the PC under
W95 (Double Yeck) at the moment and soon under W98 (Single Yeck).
I am looking at a two year old Pentium III 750 with 256 MBytes of memory
and an EIDE 40 GByte hard drive for the "newer" system. While my
estimate of the existing Pentium 166 MMX is about 3 times a PDP-11/73,
I seem to be looking at 15 times a PDP-11/73 on the Pentium III 750.
Just for example, I compared two 32 MByte MSCP RAM: disks (yes, E11
is the commercial version) - about 30 seconds vs 5 seconds.
(d) More if anyone is interested - usually not!