Installing an operating system on an 11/83

[Glen Slick]

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.

>