8 Sep
2014
8 Sep
'14
2:06 p.m.
On Sep 8, 2014, at 3:42 PM, Andriy Romanenko <bigral at hotmail.com> wrote:
RSTS/11 runs on 16 bit (no MMU) PDP-11 Unibus machines. For example, it works on an
11/20. I suppose it could be ported to an 11/03 if you had the source code (and a DOS
system on which to build it). But I don?t believe it would run as-is. There?s also the
issue of terminal interfaces: RSTS/11 only supports DL interfaces (single line
interfaces). And only old small disk drives (RC, RF, RK, RP02/03). And it?s Basic-Plus
only, no other languages.
(There was a variation that was created at the University of Illinois from an even earlier
RSTS. It looks like it was meant to run some other languages, but I have no details at
all, apart from a single assembly listing I found somewhere and saved. It does look like
a fairly complete OS listing, so if someone wanted to scan a couple of hundred pages worth
of line printer listing, it could perhaps be reverse engineered. It?s from around 1971,
if I remember right. The banner page calls it ?BTSS?.)
paul
> I'm
sure you mean something standard so this doesn't fit, but in 1985
> I wrote a stand-alone time-slicing version of the FORTH-79 system I'd
> been working on, that ran on a PDT-11/150 (which is essentially a bad
> emulation of a PDP-11/03) with four terminals on the DLV-like ports.
> Years ago I did more work to make it auto-size a bit, and support
> mass storage other than the PDT's RXT11 controller (I briefly had it
> working with real DECtapes while the hardware was still alive).
> Fun stuff, even if it's totally impractical.
I assume forth should make multi-user system more robust (because access to real hardware
somewhat restricted). Do you have this project on github?
Also, wikipedia says about rsts-11 (rsts up to v4b), is this also capable of running on
pdp11/03 with multi-terminal and time-sharing between users/applications?