11/[9]4 latest

[Jerome H. Fine]

 >Rod Smallwood wrote:

> >On 06/06/2016 10:36, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
>
>> >Rod Smallwood wrote:
>>
>>> >On 06/06/2016 03:51, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
>>>
>>>> >Rod Smallwood wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I have a box full of 8" floppies. BTW how many 8" floppies do you 
>>>>> think there were in an RT11 distribution? 
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I can't remember for sure, but I think there were eight SSDD (RX02) 
>>>> floppies
>>>> plus an Auto-Install floppy.  That would have been for V05.06 of 
>>>> RT-11 which
>>>> requires over 6,800 blocks for an RL02 disk pack.  Since some of 
>>>> the files
>>>> get duplicated, eight seems about right.
>>>>
>>>> I doubt that V05.07 of RT-11 from Mentec was ever supported on RX02
>>>> floppies.  The size of the binary distribution for V05.07 of RT-11 
>>>> is over
>>>> 16,600 blocks on an RL02 disk pack of which over 9,000 blocks are
>>>> DSK files (one of which is 7,000 blocks) which Mentec added to the
>>>> V05.07 RT-11 distribution.
>>>>
>>>> Using RX01 floppies will take many more since there are only half 
>>>> the blocks
>>>> or 494 blocks on a SSSD (RX01) floppy.
>>>>
>>>> Do you have any other questions?  I don't know of any RT-11 
>>>> distributions
>>>> on RX02 image files for either V05.06 or V05.07 of RT-11. There may
>>>> be some for earlier versions. 
>>>
>>>
>>> The first one out of the box read 1/87  and its not the date. 
>>
>> Can you provide a DIR of the first few floppies?  The names and
>> sizes of the files will pin down which version of RT-11 if the
>> actual dates were not correct.  Otherwise, the dates of the files,
>> if they are correct, will specify the version of RT-11 if the dates
>> are 1983 (or after) when V05.00 of RT-11 was released.  Before
>> 1983, there were many updates, so there is more confusion.
>>
>> Internally, each SAV file has a version and each MAC file also
>> has a version number which will also help identify the file aside
>> from a BINCOM to compare two files. 
>
> It a little difficult to do a dir when I have yet to get the drive I 
> would do it on working
> So I'm just inventorying this box of 8" floppies.
>
> There are a number (14) of clear packages with DEC original sets  in
> They are marked
> RT-11 ,  RT11 V4.5B  or RT11 V4.5C
> Plus loose disks with RT11 utilities
> and OS/8 disks
> I do have a pair of RX01's but I am less sure about the controller.
>
> Also available is a TK50 UNIBUS CONTROLLER not a TUK50 CONTROLLER as 
> sometimes described.

The only two relevant dates that I am confident of are for the RT-11
binary distributions of:

RT-11   V04.00   February 28th, 1980   152 files     3213 blocks
RT-11   V05.00   March 12th, 1983       182 files     4026 blocks

I assume that you may have distributions for V04.05B of RT-11 and
V04.05C of RT-11.  I seem to remember that between 1980 and 1982,
DEC provided update files to users who were paying for the update
service and that the users may have been responsible for applying the
updates to their distributions in order to keep their RT-11 distributions
up-to-date.

If you have any additional information, please let us know and we can
attempt to figure things out.

Jerome Fine