Looks like I made a mistake (badly).I thought 4.2 was on CD I was just trying to remember which vms it was that I used on that micro-vax IIback in the mid-80s, it certainly wasn't on tape would it have been 5.2 ? or what was the earliest CD version of vms?that would probably be the best place to start. if someone had an ISO of that Dan.

If Dan was using a MicroVAX in the late 80s it might have been running MicroVMS V4.1(?) and it might have come on RX50 (lots of RX50s ...). The first system I managed was a MicroVAX II which was running MicroVMS V4.5C (had to be V4.5C to be in a LAVC with a VS2000). That one was installed from TK50. I'd have to look to see when the first CD VMS release came out but I know I've seen internal-to-DEC CDs for products dated 1992, so V5.0 seems like a good bet. Adrian Graham [binarydinosaurs at gmail.com] wrote: Until you've used a TU58 to boot S/A BACKUP on a VAX-11/750 as part of the VMS V4.7 to VMS V5.0 upgrade, I don't think you've lived :-) Antonio arcarlini at iee.org

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 5:19 AM, Adrian Graham <binarydinosaurs at gmail.com> wrote: Yes... lots of floppies. We bought a MicroVAX I when they were first announced, so I did the MicroVMS 1.0 -> MicroVMS 4.1 -> 4.2 -> etc dance. Because the first one ended up being used for hardware testing of our product before bagging and shipping, we never did upgrade that one (4MB, RQDX1, RD51 (10MB), RX50). We did "cheat" to back it up - the machine had (still has) a quad extender card permanently installed, so we removed the COMBOARD under test, and installed an RLV12 and backed up the machine to RL02. Installs and upgrades still took hours, though. I've worked with a few of those, but on our 11/750 (with a MASSBUS-like host card). TK50 installs weren't much faster than RX50 installs, but at least you could walk away and come back (hours) later and it was done. That was a typical boot time if you used the standard TU58 boot tape, but since the onboard 8085 console processor cached the directory tracks (meaning it didn't have to keep hitting the front off the tape to get a new file), we routinely copied the files off of each successive boot tape and wrote a trivial DCL script to build the tape with the files installed in the order in which they would be read off the media. Our 11/730 ran VMS 5.0 at the end of its days (it was our "linking" machine for producing software releases - the build scripts copied the object files over DECnet to it and built VMS 5.0-friendly executables then pulled the results back to our tape-making area), and with the carefully-scripted boot tapes, we could reboot in well under 10 minutes. The time spent reading tape was only about 2-3 minutes of the process. That was upgraded to a uVAX II which I still have in my garage. Those are good, solid machines as long as what you want to do fits in the max memory available. I have lived. More than once, it seems. ;-) I don't think there are many versions on CD much older than that. I don't remember when distribution CDs first came into fashion, but ISTR getting a dummy CD (blank, with an advertising label) at a DECUS in Anaheim in the late 1980s. We were so behind on the times with our hardware, that in 1994, we were still on 9-track/TU58 and TK50 software distribution, long after CDs were an option. -ethan

I see... I teally must spend some time and get my 11/730 running again. It's one of only 2 series of VAXen that I would really consider running at home [1] (the other being the 11/780 series, of course, but I don't have space for that...) [1] In that I can repair it. The 11/730 is all unprotected PALs and standard ICs. The only custom aprts are the memory ECC gate arrays, and I would geuss it's posible to kludge something if that foil (even if you then don;t ahve ECC memory). The crazy thing about the 11/730 is the CPU control store. It's DRAM. Which means the CPU has to be pasued every so often to refresh the control store (unlike video RAM, say, you cna't assume that enough locations will be accessed naturally to do this). Whatever were they thinking????!? -tony

Even booting RT-11 on a TU-58 could take over lunch hour. I could be shorter if the take was set up correctly. The most fun I had with a real DEC TU-58 tape drive and real DEC media was setting up a bootable Y2K version of RT-11 on a TU-58 media, connecting the dual external TU-58 tape drive to a PC via a serial port which had been connected to a PC running the PDP-11 E11 emulator on a Pentium 266 MHz system. It took just as long to boot, but it was worth it the first time. That was around 1997. Jerome Fine