Software for small-memory PDP-11s?

Josh Dersch derschjo at gmail.com
Fri Nov 13 16:45:17 CST 2015


Hey all --

Now that I have my PDP-11/05 running nicely, I'm curious what others are
running on small systems like this -- until this point I've only played
with larger (i.e. at least 28KW memory) systems.  I have only 8KW of memory
(with no viable options for expansion) and there's not much out there that
I've found.  There's paper-tape BASIC (which is always fun) and FOCAL, and
PTS-11 (http://iamvirtual.ca/PDP-11/PTS-11/PTS-11.htm) which is pretty cool
if a bit cumbersome.  Any other suggestions?

I'm also curious if any version of RT-11 that supports the TU58 could be
made to run on this system -- I have two SLUs in the system so in theory I
can boot from an emulated TU58. However RT-11 4.0's SYSGEN manuals suggest
that 12KW is the minimum supported (and experimentation bears this out) and
I can't find much in the way of manuals for RT-11 V3B -- which I believe is
the earliest version with TU58 support.  (V3B seems to be different enough
from later versions that I'm not quite sure how the SYSGEN process works.)

Thanks as always,
Josh


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