On 2/21/2022 6:55 PM, Glen Slick via cctalk wrote: Another alternative would be, after installing an OS under SimH using another program as was suggested here, to transfer the disk image (e.g. vtserver https://github.com/chapmajs/vtserver ). JRJ

On 22/02/2022 00:55, Glen Slick via cctalk wrote: Exactly, the best solution is an RX50 distribution. I have never seen one or a way of making one. If you have a PDP-11 with an RX50 then you would need one. Rod

On 22/02/2022 02:35, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: Yes that's right they are at different addresses as per the manual Rod

On Mon, 21 Feb 2022, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote: No arguments there. Are RX50 drives less robust than what was used to install Windoze 95?

On Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 8:34 PM Chris Zach via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.orgwrote: I notice you didn't say TK50 here :) I recently read 400 odd RX50s from my old DEC Rainbow collection recently. All but 3 read perfectly. Are any of my distro kits not online? I can probably read them with a I have a kyroflux I used to image a bunch of Rainbow Venix disks... love it, but I've had it a long time... Warner

On 22/02/2022 03:27, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: I never installed it this way myself, but MicroVMS on the MicroVAX II was distributed on RX50 floppies: lost of them. Of course, that was then and the floppy drives were younger and less temperamental (and perhaps the same could be said about the people feeding the drives floppies ...) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini antonio at acarlini.com

On 22/02/2022 14:19, Adrian Graham via cctalk wrote: I remember doing the V5 upgrade on a VAX-11/750 but via tape. You still needed to boot from TU58, which seemed to take roughly forever. I imagine it was possible to hook up RX50s to a VAX-11/750 but I never saw one configured that way. Why not use tape :-) Antonio -- Antonio Carlini antonio at acarlini.com

On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 10:20 AM Antonio Carlini via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: We had an RUX50 on our 11/750 (I still have it). It's just another MSCP controller, but since we had a UDA50, our RUX50 was configured at an alternate address. I suppose we could have booted off of it, but we would have needed a bootstrap that could boot from a non-primary controller. Our boot ROMs only knew how to boot device 0 on the primary controller. -ethan

On 2/21/22 22:27, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: Did he say it was an RX50? Or just a floppy. Others were supported like the RX33 which could read RX50 disks. TEAC FD-55-GFR work fine and can still be found in the wild. bill

How did you get a CD-R image of kits for those OS? I'm not sure if it has been done for RSTS but it should be possible. I once did some work for Fred Knight when he was looking into creating a CD image of the OS and all its layered products; the question was whether a bootable CD could be created that would nevertheless look like it had a valid ISO file system on it. The answer is yes and my RSTSFLX program (the V2 version) had a feature intended to produce such an image. But the project faded away before it completed, and I don't know that such a CD was ever produced. Still, a RSTS disk kit is a simple thing: a bootable disk with a RSTS file system on it, containing a few files needed to get the new system disk set up and all the remaining bits in the form of a collection of backup sets. Boot the distribution device, use the "dskint" and "copy" options to copy the basic files to the destination disk, boot that disk, and run the installation script. More precisely, those steps will all run automatically, triggered by the fact that the kit is a read-only file system. A RSTS floppy kit is tricky only because the basic files don't fit on one floppy, so you have to split them across several and include marker files that trigger media swaps. I've looked for the MicroRSTS kit building scripts but don't think I've seen them. Reverse engineering them is certainly possible. Not trivial; all that machinery assumes it's running on the RSTS team's main development machine, which isn't what I have. As for the question why there aren't RX50 kits for many of the choices: that's because RX50 isn't a convenient distribution device, and DEC didn't sell configs such as the one we're talking about here, at least not for RSTS systems. With RSTS, you got a choice of a handful of kit media, which typically were things you'd want anyway (like a magtape, good for backups). So you'd get a system with that kind of configuration, and everything works painlessly. BTW, Rod, do you have any kind of network interface? An Ethernet device would be ideal. With that, you could install just a core setup from floppies or other hairy procedures, then copy the remaining kits across the network and install from the local copies of the kits. paul