On Thu, 16 Jun 2011, Chris Elmquist wrote: Something just occurred to me. If you're using a PDP-11 in a Real-Time environment and need to replace it, the replacements I've seen that rely on an emulator don't seem to mention if the whole replacement is itself RT. In other words, the OS may be RT, but not the OS upon which the virtual hardware is built. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

For those of you who might be interested, I contacted Transduction followed by The Logical Company who seems to be responsible for the actual NuPDQ-1000 Qbus board. I have been able to confirm that an emulator is running an Intel chip, probably at least a core 2 duo, although I am not very clear about any of the other details. In addition, it seems highly probable that rather than a VT100 (or other serial terminal) connected as the console device, the emulator application program also supports a PC VGA/keyboard port which can be used instead of the serial line at CSR=177560 to a VT100. In short, the NuPDQ-1000 Qbus board (with the hardware to emulate a PDP-11) seems to serve as a direct Qbus interface to a Qbus backplane which is also available. This directly supports any Qbus hardware which has not been supported (emulated) by the emulator / hardware combinations that are available. If there is any additional interest and response to my information, I will continue to add additional information as it becomes available. In particular, I would be extremely interested in how the emulator code is supported, or more specifically the source of that code. The answer to this question would answer almost every other question. What I am really confused about is how this new development is justified (i.e. cost effective). Are there that many PDP-11 Qbus systems out there performing non-critical applications which are more cost effective to continue to run the PDP-11 software? I had thought that by this time, most of these systems had found other solutions to continue to run. In particular, Strobe Data offers a hardware solution and emulators offer a software solution. The NuPDQ-1000 seems to combine both, but at a much higher cost. I don't yet have a price on the actual NuPDQ-1000 board. Jerome Fine