4 Jun
2009
4 Jun
'09
4:04 p.m.
On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.plus.com> wrote:
On a couple of occasions I've taken a
PDP-11/23plus with dual RL02s into
Computer Science for Open Days, to show it running 7th Edition. ?Always used
to get a lot of interest, exactly because there's enough similarity that
people can find their way around, but enough things missing that they notice
(one of those things is speed, of course!).
That sounds like a cool demo. I've loaded 2.9BSD (from real magtape)
on an 11/24 w/dual RL02s, but it just wasn't enough room to be able to
rebuild the kernel and load man pages, IIRC. 7th Ed. should fit
better in 20MB.
One of the things that always held me back in the 1980s when I tried
to get 2BSD up on (my own) real gear was that I personally didn't own
disks big enough to hold it comfortably. I had a pile of RL01s and
RL02s, but couldn't afford RK07s or anything larger. I bought a KT24
and some memory from Terry Kennedy specifically to run 2.9BSD on the
aforementioned 11/24, but ran up against the disk issue during the
install phase (I had to run kinda stripped down, with the generic
install kernel). By the time I could afford a MicroPDP w/at least an
RD52, I was already running UNIX on old Sun gear, so that took the
pressure off trying to get it running on DEC gear.
I got my first tastes for DEC machines at work, but in the same way
that I suspect many of us on the list also feel/felt, wanted to run
the same stuff at home, single-user. To me, one of the great things
about the DEC line (and the Sun line too, for that matter) was that
OSes ran across a broad spectrum of hardware, such that I could use
VMS at my day job, but I was still able to afford an 11/725 for my own
use at home; or run RT-11 on a customer's 11/73, but do software
development on my own 11/23.
-ethan