Ed Kelleher wrote:
At 10:46 PM
10/16/2004, you wrote:
Other than software for the PDP-8 was there any
low cost time sharing
systems
that you can still find software for? Note no replies about
multi-tasking basics please.
TSX+?
A time sharing extension of RT11 on PDP11's.
Super product, very efficient.
We did a lot of PDP11 multi terminal medical billing systems with it.
S and H is till around I believe.
Jerome Fine replies:
It has been a while since I used TSX-PLUS, so I sort of
forgot that it is a true multi-job operating system with
support for many features required in that environment,
including extensive security features similar to what
are found in VMS, although limited to what is compatible
with what is essentially an RT-11 environment. TSX-PLUS
also supports a "windows" of sorts, although because it
uses standard VT100 dumb serial terminals on slow 9600
baud lines, the user is limited to switching from FULL screen
to FULL screen (i.e. no ability to have partial screens such
as with the Microsoft Windows concept) with all characters
being displayed at rates which would be considered painful
within a real DEC system. On a Pentium system with a
video card, that pain disappears.
The last time I inquired a few years ago,
S&H was still selling TSX-PLUS V6.50 which
was already Y2K compliant in 1991. If someone
actually wants to buy a license or upgrade to
the current version, contact S&H at:
http://www.sandh.com/
If S&H is no longer able to supply the current
distribution, I would be pleased to help
make copies of the physical media.
ALSO, if anyone is still running TSX-PLUS,
it is possible to shift to an emulator.
Since it is possible to run RT-11 under
E11 at more than 50 times a PDP-11/93,
I presume that is also possible for TSX-PLUS
at the same speeds.
For hobby users, E11 now supports the full
4 MBytes of memory and up to 256 GBytes of
hard disk drive files.
For commercial users of E11, many additional
features are also supported in addition to
almost unlimited disk space (relative to what
a PDP-11 can reasonably support, let alone the
speed at which I/O runs on a PDP-11 vs a
current Pentium 4 on which E11 runs) and
true RAM: disks.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
--
If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail
address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk
e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be
obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the
'at' with the four digits of the current year.
