RLV11 Debugging

[Ethan Dicks]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 10:48 PM, Jay Jaeger <cube1 at charter.net> wrote:
> The RLV11 was developed for the original LSI Bus.  I'd expect it to be
> Q-Bus compatible, but others here probably have more recent exposure.
> It has been a  while since I worked with an 11/23.

In 1987, all I could afford was a used 11/23 ($300 for BA11-N, CPU,
256K of RAM, DLV11J 4-line serial, LPV11 line printer interface, and
BDV11 bootstrap and terminator) so for disk, I picked up an RLV11
($100) and borrowed an RL01 off of my PDP-8/a.  I used that for
(RT-11) work for 2 years.  Worked great!  There should be no problems
in an 18-bit backplane.  If you want 22-bit, that's the RLV12, which
works in everything Qbus including MicroVAXen.

I never ran the diags... I just plugged in a drive with "0" plug in
it, and booted it up.  I may have borrowed an RL02 from my boss and
booted it from that first and copied the OS to my RL01 and swapped
drive plugs.  Once it was running, I had 5MB for the OS and my
development environment, and 10MB for customer data (and to transfer
deliverables to the customer site - the target was a $20,000 11/73
with 4MB of RAM and a Fujitsu Eagle disk and a few other expensive
extras (RLV12 + RL02...).  I always got a kick out of developing for a
machine that cost 50X what I paid for mine).

-ethan