ID these DEC floppy disks

Nigel Johnson Ham g4ajq1 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 17 20:12:54 CST 2022


 From my (very stale) memory, FWIW

DEC Diagnostic file names were configured thus:

First Letter - machine they run on.  ones I remember:  Z=all Unibus, 
V=LSI-11(18-bit), J=11/73(22-bit) etc.  Strangely, I seem to remember 
that C represented 11/45, but maybe they changed the scheme at one 
point. I got into sales and management with Emulex after the 11/73A!  Or 
perhaps the letter C was prepended as a media type and the rest follows 
the pattern

Second and third letters, the system part they were designed for.  
Strangely, VMSxxx would be memory tests for the LSI-11, nothing to do 
with VMS/

Fourth letter was the actual diagnostic name if more than one for each part.

Fifth and sixth letters were major and minor rev levels.

So really the names were only unique to four positions.

When running them, I would usually only type the first four letters 
followed by two question marks.

So maybe ZUF and ZXD were amalgamations of various tests!

Or maybe they changed the scheme :-)

cheers,

Nigel


Nigel Johnson, MSc., MIEEE, MCSE VE3ID/G4AJQ/VA3MCU
Amateur Radio, the origin of the open-source concept!
Skype:  TILBURY2591nw.johnson at ieee.org



On 2022-02-17 20:26, Glen Slick via cctalk wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 4:28 PM Chris Zach via cctalk
> <cctalk at classiccmp.org>  wrote:
>> Hey all!
>>
>> While going through floppies I found these and was wondering what they
>> were. Only clue in Google was someone asking in 1997 same thing.
>>
>> BL-T540B-M1 CZUFDB1 USER TESTS
>> BL-T541B-M1 CZXD1B1 FIELD SERVICE TESTS 1
>> BL-T542B-MC CZXD2B0 FIELD SERVICE TESTS 2
>> BL-T565B-MC CZXD3B0 FIELD SERVICE TESTS 3
>> BL-T583B-MC CZXD4B0 FIELD SERVICE TESTS 4
>>
>> Any ideas? The first one does not have a write protect tab, the others
>> do. There is also one other disk I found
>>
>> CZMX4E0 Micro 11 Maint RX50 4
>>
>> On this one the write protect flag was torn off (was on from factory and
>> removed)
> My guess is that these are Micro-11 diagnostic test disks, as
> mentioned in Section 5.7 USER TEST DISKETTES, on Page 5-12, of this
> manual:
> MicroPDP-11 Systems Technical Manual, EK-MIC11-TM-002
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/microPDP11/EK-MIC11-TM-002_MicroPDP11_Systems_Technical_Manual_Sep85.pdf
>
> These possibly related tests are listed as being included as part of
> the XXDP distribution on page A-22 of the PDP-11 Diagnostic Handbook,
> 1988
> http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp11/xxdp/PDP11_DiagnosticHandbook_1988.pdf
>
> ZUFlEO.BIN    MICRO-11 USER TEST #1
> ZUF2EO.BIN    MICRO-11 USER TEST #2
> ZUF3AO.BIN    MICRO-11 USER TEST #3
> ZUF4AO.BIN    MICRO-11 USER TEST #4
>
> If you have the ability to create ImageDsk images of these disks it
> might be interesting to take a look at them.


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