Mentec - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 May 2007

Hi Jerome

	We seem to be converging on our views. The simulator is a simple
issue. I want to see the old systems run and live again. If I had spent
years restoring an old aircraft to flying condition I would not park it
and use MS flight simulator instead! 

RT-11, RSX-11M & RSX11-D, and RSTS were all current when I joined DEC in
1975. The hardware to support them (Mentec excepted) has not been made
for at least ten years. The answer may lie a little deeper. I think what
may lie at the back of it is if they provide it they may be liable for
any damage it does. Licenses do not change laws and the law of the land
will always take precedence. It might be a risk based decision.

However I'd still like to know what are the answers to the fundimental
questions:

	1.  Are Mentec still selling PDP-11 operating system licenses?

	2.  Are they still making PDP-11 hardware?

	3.  Why have Mentec removed all mention of PDP-11 products from
their web sites.

Rod

-----Original Message-----
From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org
[mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Jerome H. Fine
Sent: 07 May 2007 02:44
To: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: RE: Mentec

...
 Rod Smallwood wrote: 
...
 Well that's interesting...

It would seem that as long as Mentec choose to ignore non-commercial 
use you can do (within reason) what you like. I did say pdp preserver 
as opposed to RT, RSX or RSTS preserver.
However I must admit to having worked in digital SWS and to having been 
...
 part of the VMS marketing group I do have an interest
in the software 
side.
 Jerome Fine replies:

Hold on - I stated that everything being suggested was ONLY with regard
to RT-11.  While I also agree that eventually RSX-11 and RSTS/E will
probably be handled in the same manner, that does not seem to have been
the case in the past.  In particular, I have the impression that RSX-11
distributions, although officially approved of in the same license as
RT-11 for use with the DEC emulator, always remained difficult to
obtain.  However, since I never attempted to use RSX-11, I can't
comment.  On the other hand, RT-11 was very quickly available for
download as soon as that license to run
V05.03 of RT-11 and prior versions was made explicitly known to this
list and certain newsgroups.

...
 DEC were quite keen on educational computing and
that's how they would 
have viewed a hobbyist program. As HP now effectivly own what was DEC I 
...
 assume the agreement is now between them and Mentec.
 It does not really seem that either HP or Mentec are interested in
spending money on lawyers.  HP and Mentec do seem to be very concerned
that if any of the latest versions of the PDP-11 operating systems which
include RT-11, RSX-11 and RSTS/E are made available free of charge and
without a formal license being signed to even hobby users for strictly
non-commercial use that the result would also be free use for commercial
users.  At least that is my assumption since I can't think of anything
else that might cause a problem.  Can anyone else comment on what might
happen if Mentec were to allow hobby users to freely run without any
restrictions either V05.03 of RT-11 or possibly even all RT-11 software,
in particular with regard to commercial users of RT-11 or for hobby
users of RSX-11 and RSTS/E?

...
 It seems that many efforts to set up a hobbyist (or
collectors program) 
...
 have come to nought due to Mentec seeing no profit in
the arrangement.
 That is also my assumption.

It was also my assumption that hobby programs allow students to become
capable of supporting commercial systems as well as producing
interesting enhancements for and finding bugs in operating systems.  As
long as the operating system software is still being sold and producing
sufficient profit, a hobby program is often a benefit and support to the
operating system.  Once the profit level becomes too low, starting a
hobby program seems no longer useful and perhaps that is how HP and
Mentec view a hobby program for the PDP-11 software which Mentec
handles.

...
 Needless to say as a DEC hardware collector a simulator
is of no 
interest to me.

 I am always confused by this viewpoint.  Please explain.  If you don't
really care about the software, then why do you care which software is
being used by the hardware?  In fact, why is it necessary to run any
software at all?  I would have expected that the XXDP diagnostics would
be more than sufficient to exercise the actual DEC hardware and provide
the feeling that the actual DEC hardware is being used.

On the other hand, I am quite obviously interested in the functionally
of the software and the manner in which the various software components
relate to each.  As a result, an emulator is often much more useful than
the actual DEC hardware.  In respect of using E11, about the only real
difference that I notice is that the RT-11 programs tend to execute
about 100 times as fast on a current 3 GHz Pentium 4 as on a PDP-11/93,
including both CPU and I/O, indeed especially disk I/O;  the available
storage is also likely to be measured in the 1000 times capacity since
500 GigiByte hard disk drives now cost less than the 600 MegaByte Maxtor
ESDI XT8760E that I purchased for $ 600 at an end-of-line sale around 10
to 15 years ago.  As a result, one of the enhancements that I plan for
RT-11 is to allow up to 65536 RT-11 partitions which will allow for hard
disk drives up to 2 TeraBytes.  Anyone interested?

...
  Hi All
       I'm a bit confused about this Mentec issue. They bought up the 
rights to the pdp-11 line and even produced some new boards. Now they 
seem to have abandoned the whole thing.  I can only find one web site 
that could be theirs but it is very up market corporate image stuff. 
No

mention of pdp anything.
 Jerome Fine replies:

First of all, please remember I am ONLY interested in RT-11.  And while 
...
 I have had contact with and used a bit of RSX-11 and a
very extensive 
amount of RSTS/E, I was never responsible of a system which ran RSX-11 
or RSTS/E.  Which is the primary reason that I never became proficient 
enough to maintain either an RSX-11 or a RSTS/E system.  On the other 
hand, I may now know RT-11 as well as some of the top RT-11 developers 
knew RT-11 during the 1980s.

As for why Mentec no longer actively supports any of the PDP-11 
systems, I venture to guess that it is no longer profitable.

>As I am in the middle of restoring some pdp-11/94's the issue around 
>how
>RT11 and RSX could be made available is of much interest. If they have 
...
  not sold the
rights and are not pursuing the business perhaps they 
could help us poor pdp preservers.

Mentec has helped the poor PDP-11 preservers.  Unfortunately, it is not 
...
 obvious since the help is more in not causing those
poor PDP-11 
preservers any difficulties as opposed to being proactive by making the 
...
 operating systems generally available such as Borland
products are at 
present.  Also an example is the VMS hobby program which Mentec does 
not have.

In addition, as others have mentioned in their replies, it seems very 
doubtful that Mentec really did "totally own" the
PDP-11 operating systems.  Unfortunately, it seems highly probable that 
...
 the terms of the agreement between Mentec and DEC
required the parties 
to maintain confidentiality since I can't see why those terms have 
never been publicly disclosed - unless those terms were so detrimental 
to the users that neither party wanted to admit the mistakes in the 
lack of a
PDP-11 hobby program in the face of the VMS hobby license program.  But 
...
 what did happen did, what did not happen did not - the
stories and 
interpretations that many of us make up about what happened are 
probably 90% fiction and are no longer even important.

BUT, Mentec did make older versions of the operating systems available 
for legal non-commercial use under what was at the time a DEC owned 
emulator.  It certainly seemed questionable at the time and it may be 
even more questionable at present, but Mentec has chosen to make no 
challenge to the use of those older versions of the operating systems 
under the current name of that DEC emulator which has evolved to become 
...
 SIMH.  In addition, Mentec also seems to be ignoring
the legal 
requirement for a transfer of any operating system license to the new 
owner of any old PDP-11 hardware so long as, at least as far I can 
interpret, the new owner is non-commercial.  Certainly there have been 
numerous discussions on classiccmp (one is going on right now about a 
single RL02 system) over PDP-11 use of the RT-11 operating system (i.e.
NOT under SIMH) and I can't remember any recent protests from Mentec in 
...
 this regard.

Any finally, while the RSX-11 and RSTS/E operating systems are much 
more tightly controlled and not very easily available, almost 10 years 
ago, Megan Gentry, a former RT-11 developer, put a zip file of V05.03 
of
RT-11 up for general download with the explicit permission of the 
individuals who had to provide that permission.  V05.03 of RT-11 is the 
...
 last binary distribution allowed under the DEC emulator
and by 
inference under SIMH.  There is also a CD version (an ISO file) which 
contains as many as possible of the RT-11 binary versions as could 
reasonably be found for all of V05.03 of RT-11 and prior.  Any for 
those individuals who are legally licensed to run the latest version of 
...
 RT-11, V05.07 released in October of 1998 or just under
9 years ago, 
there is also a CD containing the rest of the RT-11 binary 
distributions.  The latter CD was requested by a university who was 
legally licensed to use and already had a copy of V05.07 of RT-11 and 
was legally entitled to a backup of all of the RT-11 binary distributions.
...

So - I don't really think that there are any "poor pdp preservers"
as far as RT-11 is concerned.  In point of fact, I have personally 
found ABSOLUTELY  NO  INTEREST in the last 5 years in:
(a) Preserving RT-11,
(b) Fixing any bugs in RT-11
(c) Making any enhancements in RT-11
Of course, for individuals in the know, most of them already have 
sufficiently preserved what they want of RT-11.  On the other hand, 
even though I have made a number of vital bug fixes to
RT-11 (for problems that crash RT-11) along with other minor problems 
as well as some extensive enhancements, I have yet to find anyone who 
is even interested in a Y3K for RT-11, let alone someone who would be 
interested in participating.

Of course, Y3K may already have been done, the enhancements that I have 
...
 already completed may have been duplicated along with
many other 
enhancements and the bugs fixed as well and distributed to the users of 
...
 RT-11.  Perhaps I just don't know that it has all
occurred without a 
word of it reaching my eyes and ears.

But, as a result, I have place (a), (b) and (c) into a lower priority 
and focused on attempting something even less useful, i.e. confirming 
the value of pi(10^18) using a sieve program running under RT-11 with a 
...
 view to attempting to determine pi(10^24).  When I find
that it will 
take a million years to finish the calculations for pi(10^24) with 
current computers, I may shift back to (a), (b) and (c) if I can't find 
...
 something even less useful than knowing the value for
pi(10^24).

On the other hand, if anyone is really interested, drop me a line.  If 
anyone really knows why Mentec does not have a hobby program for PDP-11 
...
 operating systems, let us know.  Just don't
complain about RT-11 and 
Mentec since nothing that Mentec seems to be doing at present 
interferes with "poor pdp preservers"
as far as RT-11 is concerned.  In 16 more years, which will be 25 years 
...
 after V05.07 of RT-11 was released, I very seriously
doubt that Mentec 
will care if every hobby user who wants a copy of V05.07 of RT-11 is 
using it on real DEC hardware, let alone if there is a running emulator 
...
 on what goes for a PC in the year 2023 when I will be
84 years old if I 
...
 am still kicking.

As for commercial sites still running RT-11, if they don't already have 
...
 the Y2K compliant V05.07 of RT-11, then I very much
doubt that they 
will require V05.07 in the year 2023.
And if those commercial sites are managing with the current bugs in
RT-11 9 years after V05.07 was released, well ...

Sincerely yours,

Jerome Fine
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