PDP-11

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Wed May 11 14:45:46 CDT 2016


> On May 11, 2016, at 3:30 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> From: Dave Wade
> 
>> I have recently a PDP-11 which apparently came from a VAX console.
> 
> If that's really where it came from, it's a QBUS 11/03. (And IIRC only the
> 780 had a PDP-11 console, although I'm not a VAX expert.)

Some others had a PRO as their console.  Don't remember which models specifically.

> ...
>> I have done lots of searching and there doesn't seem to be a simple
>> list of what can run on it
> 
> Well, nothing that needs memory management - at least, as it sits. You could
> swap out the CPU card for an 11/23 or 11/73, then you could run an OS that
> needs memory management (Unix, or one of the DEC OS's that needs it - I know
> nothing of the DEC OS's for the -11, someone else here will, though). And
> your backplane is probably so-called Q18, limited to 256KB of memory, but
> that's easy to upgrade.

The 11/03 should run RT-11 nicely.  Limited RSX, possibly; I don't know those details.  RSTS V4 also runs on unmapped PDP-11 systems, but that OS only supports Unibus machines and a very limited set of disk controllers (which doesn't include floppies).

	paul




More information about the cctalk mailing list