On 5/21/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote: Once you have decided it's safe to power on and all of that, the first thing I'd do is to determine what boot PROMs you have (D, I think was typically TU58), and see what's easy to boot from. If your machine had a UDA50 on it, there's probably a DU boot PROM which will also boot, ISTR, an RUX50 (yes... you could stick floppies on an 11/750 - we did it to be able to cut diskettes for our customers - I think it was a very expensive option at the time). To load any OS onto a blank 11/750, you'll need images/tapes with the standalone restore program for that version of the OS... they changed on a frequent basis. I won't say it's impossible to do it with the wrong one, but it's easier all around if you match the versions up. I really liked working with the 11/750. I used one every day for most of the time between 1984 and 1993, and did all of the hardware upkeep on it for the last few years it was installed. As a college boy/punk kid, I installed the 2MB to 8MB myself (we decided not to drop the money on upgrading it above 8MB). It was OK for 20-50 users with 8MB, but we mostly ran MAIL, MASS-11 (word processing), and compiled C programs with it. Oh, yeah... lots of EMPIRE. Had to keep EMPIRE on it for the boss ;-) Yes, mostly (as in, yes, the 11/730 needs it, and mostly, the 11/750 does not need it). For the 11/730 (and 11/725), yes, the microcode comes off the TU58 every time you power up. Once the microcode is loaded, you can boot without a tape mounted, but in practice, folks just left their boot tapes mounted. For the 11/750, the only time we ever used the console TU58 was when we were installing a new OS from scratch and had to load the Standalone Backup tapes (or the equivalent for Ultrix or BSD), or after a certain point in our VMS usage when it was recommended (but not absolutely essential) to load a microcode patch when we powered up. Considering that machine stayed up for months between power cycles (and weeks between reboots), it didn't happen very often. An unpatched 11/750 should load VMS < 4.4 just fine (but check the SPRs). After that is when I get a little fuzzy. We never experienced any strange machine checks, but our FSE recommended we patch our microcode (recommended as in "this has to be loaded for me to work on the machine") I don't think we bothered to load the microcode patch when we swapped over to Ultrix 1.1 or 2.0 on it. We ran 4.0BSD and 4.1BSD on that same machine years before that patch came out, so it wasn't an issue. Not just UNIBUS - MASSBUS, too. There's a DR boot PROM out there - we used it to boot our SI9900 w/160MB Fujitsu that emulated 2x RM03. The RA70 series are hardly power-hungry, but are a bit thin on the ground. I have a couple of RA70s that some day I'd like to mount inside one of my 11/750s so I can have an in-cabinet machine. Of course what I'd _really_ like is a Unibus SCSI controller, but those are a bit rare. There's also the option of 3rd-party SDI drives. I've posted about this one before, but I have a 5.25"-tall rackable disk box 1/2 populated with one SDI bridge board and two 600MB ESDI drives. Compared to the power draw of an RA81, this is a pittance (5.25" FH drives are on average, what, 50W? 60W?), and 3 times the capacity. -ethan

On 5/21/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote: If I were trying to use a 11/750 for anything intense, I'd seriously consider upgrading it to 14MB, but for a low number of users (1?) 8MB goes a long way. EMPIRE is one of the best VMS games ever. It's you vs the computer in a land, air, sea battle for a continent and/or a few islands. You build up armies, march across the land, and conquer neutral or enemy-occupied cities. Unless you demand total annihilation, I recommend accepting the computer's surrender - IMO, if you get him backed that far into a corner, you are only about 50% of the way to tracking down his last man and killing it. You'll win, but it will take a long time to find his last few units. It's a bit like Civilization without the unrest and the wonders of the world, etc... just military units. Plays great on an 11/750 and VT100. Does that $40 include the cab kit? If you want to run large pedestal drives on your VAX, the RM03 isn't a bad one to use, but the MB/KhW ratio is a bit low. The good news is that if you have a few packs, you could use the RM03s with _either_ the VAX or your 11/70, just move the cables and swap the packs. The first RA81 I ever saw was on an 11/750. It was pretty fresh when I started working at that place - they'd just dropped $26,000 on the drive. I still have it. It still works (or at least the last time I spun it up, it did). There's nothing inherently "wrong" with an RA81 (except for the ones with bad glue ;-), but at 1000W for 450MB, I'd rather have a smaller drive and spend the electricity budget on the CPU. If you _really_ want the 11/750 experience, though, I gotta recommend MASSBUS disks. We booted ours from the SI9900, and had a Fuji Eagle and an RA81 for data disks - nearly a Gig between 3 spindles in 1988! -ethan

On 5/21/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote: (googled for 'empire.exe') http://www.decus.org/libcatalog/description_html/v00012.html (but you'll need to twiddle the RMS attributes into 512-byte fixed so VMS will treat it like an executable). Yes... you do have to fiddle backplane jumpers. There are no 11/750 MASSBUS slot grant cards AFAIK. I stripped down a dead RM80 nearly 15 years ago. I did keep the pedestals for the parts-RM03 we also stripped down to keep our hot-spare RM03s going. My PDP-8/e is presently resting where an RM03 formerly sat, with an RK05 in the bottom. I wish I'd been able to keep the RM03s when the company folded, but 4 van loads was all I could manage. We left behind a TU78 (mostly working, but a bit dodgy), two RK07s, two RM03s, a VAX 8530, lots of RK07 disk packs, and dozens of VT100 and clone terminals. I did keep a bunch of the terminals, and I was thinking of polishing a few up to bring to VCFmw if anyone wants a CiTOH 101 or 101e - they are nice clones, either VT100-style with a built-in clock on the setup screen (set with command codes in my LOGIN.COM), or more of a Wyse 50-shape capable of supporting two host connections (not dual session - there's no retention of screen contents). When I worked there, I typically had one 101 and one 101e on my desk, for 3 simultaneous logins across two or three machines _before_ I flipped the knob on my terminal selector ;-) In many ways, those were the days - I still do lots and lots of shell/command-line programming, just as I did then. Now, though, I have lots more than three active sessions going. -ethan

try this http://www.classicempire.com/ halfway down the page official versions On 5/22/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote:

"FTP" icon on the above link: Works for me. I could email the .zip to you. Can your email reader handle an 87KB attachment :-) Antonio

On 5/22/07, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote: Yep. There's a 12-drive FC RAID box in there right now (thanks, Patrick!), but it's just resting in there (unless someone ever makes a FC host card for the Omnibus ;-) ASR-33 off to the side so I can load papertape diagnostics. The 101 is the model shaped and colored much like a VT100. The keyboard looks similar (except for logos, IIRC), but its protocol is _not_ compatible with the VT100. Nothing blows up, but if you get the keyboards mixed up, nothing works, either. -ethan