RT-11 idle light pattern

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Sun Dec 31 08:41:08 CST 2017


    > From: Paul Koning

    > RSTS-11 V4, which had a major reliability problem ... As part of trying
    > to keep the customer placated, DEC supplied full OS sources, 5
    > dectapes. ... We printed them ... I still have copies of those files.

Is that version available online? If not, maybe an OCR project?

(Although I know other versions of RSTS-11 are available, so maybe it's not
rare enough to make the tedium of OCR worth it. That has been used on a
number of systems; notably CTSS, but also the IMP code and the Apollo
Guidance Computer, that I know of. I'm currently looking into getting an
early version of MERT, and that may also come down to OCR - if we're lucky!)


    > Stranger still is the "fancy" lights in RSTS ... "Fancy" because it
    > produces a rotating pattern not just in the data lights which is easy,
    > but also in the address lights. It runs in supervisor mode

Ah; it must busy loop at loops spread across the address space? Clever!
(Perhaps using the mapping hardware so that it doesn't use too much _actual_
memory.) Is the source available?

	Noel


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