Installing an operating system on an 11/83

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 2/21/22 21:14, Jay Jaeger via cctalk wrote:
> On 2/21/2022 6:55 PM, Glen Slick via cctalk wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 21, 2022, 4:32 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.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>>
>>> Rod
>>>
>>
>> Is the PC old enough to still have PCI slots? If it is, one option 
>> would be
>> to pick up a cheap PCI SCSI controller, e.g. an AHA-2940, that you can 
>> use
>> to write disk images to a SCSI hard drive. Then use SIMH to create disk
>> images of an OS of interest that can then be dumped to the SCSI hard 
>> drive.
>> Or pick up a SCSI2SD device to use with the CMD CQD-220A instead of a 
>> SCSI
>> disk drive. Then copy disk images created using SIMH on the PC to an SD
>> card.
>>
>> Is the CQD-220A a /TM version, or an /E version? If it's a /TM version 
>> you
>> could also pick up a cheap SCSI tape drive, and create installation tapes
>> for RSTS/E or 2.11BSD and boot from those to install on a SCSI hard 
>> drive.
>> I've done that a few times just for the heck of installing from tape. If
>> you have the /E version (or /T/M version) instead of the /TM version you
>> can do either MSCP or TMSCP,  but not both at the same time.
>>
>> For RT-11, that is small enough it wouldn't be difficult to install from
>> RX-50 disks, if you had a means to create disks from images.
>>
>>>
> 
> Another alternative would be, after installing an OS under SimH using 
> another program as was suggested here, to transfer the disk image (e.g. 
> vtserver  https://github.com/chapmajs/vtserver ).
> 

It would be slow (but no slower than the above suggestion. :-).  I am
pretty sure there was a tape image available for installing 2.11 using
VTServer.  I even think I did it once or twice.  Haven't had a real
PDP-11 up for a while but I used to have fully patched versions running
on an 11/23, and 11/73 and an 11/93.  Just wish I could get some PMI
memory for that 93.

bill