Installing an operating system on an 11/83

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 21, 2022, at 7:32 PM, Rod Smallwood via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
>   I have built an 11/83 in a BA23 box.
> 
>   It has a KDJ-11B, 2mB PMI memory, an RQDX3 with an RX50 attached,
> 
> Plus a CMD CQD 220A Disk controller with a digital RH18A 2Gig SCSI drive attached.
> 
> Diag sees drive as RA82.
> 
> It boots and runs the diag disk and XXDP+ just fine.
> 
> I do not have install distributions for any of the 11/83 operating systems.
> 
> Daily driver system is a Windows 10 PC.
> 
> So how do I install an operating system?
> 
> Suggestions please.

So all you have is a BIG disk and a floppy drive?  You're in a world of hurt.

The straightforward answer is to get an OS kit on floppies, and run the installation procedure.  The problem is that a lot of the more obvious choices for OS (given that you have a 22 bit machine with bit memory and disk) don't have floppy kits.  For example, RSTS has a trimmed down kit called "micro-RSTS" back in the V9 era; I don't know that a V10 version of that was ever done.  And even the severe trim job still took 10 floppies.

Do you have a PC that can do I/O to that SCSI drive?  If so, the best answer may be to run SIMH on that PC, with the SCSI disk as its disk drive.  Then feed an install kit to an emulated SIMH tape drive or whatever you need for the kit media.  Or you could do an image copy of someone else's system, provided it sits on a disk that's close enough in size to what you have.  "Close enough" depends on the OS.  For example, with RSTS it would work so long as the two devices have the same "device cluster size", i.e., their sizes rounded up to the next power of two are the same.

An obvious question is what sort of system you're looking for.  RT, RSX-11/M+, RSTS, Ultrix, BSD 2.11 are all possibilities.  Exotic choices like IAS or DSM may not like the CPU and/or the controller.  But RT and Ultrix are, to put it mildly, rather different systems.

	paul