New subject: Geek Wives, was ->RE: SCSI drive available

3 Oct 2002

...
  I probably have the room, but not the inclination.  I
am
 really a software person - the hardware is just there to
 run the software - well mostly - my wife certainly would
 not agree when she she looks at the basement full of
 PDP-11 junk. Ahh, but that merely takes a quick

#ifdef WIFE
# undef WIFE
# define WIFE	GEEK_WIFE
#endif

to fix... :)

...
  As for using the RL02 and RK05 drives, while I have
 one RK05 drive at the moment and a borrowed RKV11-D
 (THANK  YOU  Ethan Dicks - which I am close to being
 finished with) to recover some RK05 packs I obtained
 last year in Montreal, I would NEVER consider using the
 RL02 drives, let alone the RK05 drive, as a production
 unit to fix software bugs, etc.  So if I really want to run
 some code which can only be run using an RK05 device
 driver under RT-11, I would use Ersatz-11 and run the
 code on a PC under Windows 98 SE/Ersatz-11.  About
 the only problem is that it will run TOO  FAST - about
 15 times the speed of a PDP-11/93 right now and
 eventually I hope to get to 50 times the speed of a
 PDP-11/93 when a high end Pentium 4 is cheap enough. I do all my Ultrix-11
development under E11 too, simple
because (a) it's a hell of a lot faster, and (b) I can
take Falcon (the "machine") with me, including its four
RA82 drives and all the others. :)

Still.. I do try make sure it still runs (acceptably) on
Real Hardware as much as possible.  Which usually means
teaming with retrogeek-friends for Yet Another retro-session.

(did I mention the WIFE issue already?  They usually seem to
have issues with these sessions, too.. duuno why ;-)

So... OK.  I probably would not run a bunch of RP's for fun
anymore.  However, I have friends ['lo, ed ;-] that do, soo... :)

--fred