PDP-11/45 RSTS/E boot problem

[Ethan Dicks]

On Tue, Jan 8, 2019 at 2:25 AM Christian Corti via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> I have 2.9BSD on a single RK05 pack *with* a small swap space, it works
> very nicely. I have a 11/45 with RK05, RL02 and RX02 in a single cabinet.

My experience with 2.9BSD on an 11/24 in the late 80s was that an
install from tape was difficult on a system with an RL02 as the main
disk because the install pulled in so much stuff that you really
needed to juggle two RL02s and mount one as /usr to get the sources
and extras if you wanted to rebuild the kernel.  I think if you used
the distro kernel there was enough room to install into 10MB (but
there wasn't room for multiple kernel files sitting around).

If you built a system on a larger configuration, I can see it would be
possible to copy only the necessary bits to an RK05 but I can't
imagine there's much room left.

As I recall, you can fit a full install (sources, man pages...) of
2.9BSD on an RK07 with plenty of room to work.

One of the challenges I had then was my largest PDP-11 at home was an
11/24 with 2MB of RAM (a used KT24 was $600!), RX11/RX01, an RL01 of
my own, and a borrowed RL02.  At work, I had access to an 11/24 with 4
RL02 and I could cable in an RK611 with two RK07 as well as a TU80
tape drive.  I did the initial install with the work rig, then trimmed
things down to fit on an RL02 to take home.

If I ever start playing with that system again, I want to find a
couple of MS11-PB (M8743) 1MB ECC cards to max it out.

-ethan