VMS drivers

Jon Elson elson at pico-systems.com
Fri Aug 28 11:34:05 CDT 2015


Hello, guys,

While rummaging through recovered backups from my MicroVAX I 
found a few items that might be of interest to the group.

I got an MDB mag tape interface (quite possibly the ONLY 
Pertec Unformatted controller ever made for Q-bus) that 
follows the MT-11 register format.  There was no driver for 
this.  I got a homebrew MT-11 driver for Unibus machines 
from somebody at work, and hacked it up to assemble for VMS 
4.7 and adjust to the quirks of the MDB board (which were 
REALLY minor).

I also have a driver for my Jupiter 7 for the MicroVAX.  
Thus used a DRV11-WA DMA interface with some wire-wrapped 
glue logic to adapt to the Jupiter's 50-pin interface bus.  
It is based on the stock DRV11-WA driver, with some 
additional logic to handle the handshakes between Jupiter 
and the DRV11.  Additionally, I built a graphics library 
based on the NASA min-Vicar image processing suite, which 
was a hideous hack job that ran on the PDP-11.  That used 
pre-assigned, numbered files.  I generalized it to use 
normal VMS files of arbitrary size, but otherwise kept most 
of the original functions.  I used the VMS table driven 
parser, tparse, to parse most of the commands.

I also knew a fair bit about Versatec printers back then, if 
anybody ever wants to get one of those hideous machines running.

If anybody is interested in these drivers, etc. let me know.

Jon


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