
PDP-11 Booting - rmason
http://trmm.net/PDP-11/Booting
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WalterBright
I had an LSI-11. It was a real sweet machine. DEC completely missed the micro
revolution - they could have owned it. So sad.

~~~
imglorp
They tried. Remember the DECMate and Rainbow and all those? Our school taught
us MACRO-11, pre-standard C, RSX-11, and Pascal on them. They aimed at the
small office and word processor crowd but were poorly marketed. They included
such dirty tricks as putting glue in the peripheral card slots of cheaper
models, to differentiate the expensive models.

[http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=468](http://www.old-
computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=468)

~~~
flyinghamster
As I recall, DEC didn't like the idea of people formatting their own floppy
disks, either, and didn't supply a FORMAT utility, even with the version of
MS-DOS shipped with the Rainbow. The idea was that you were supposed to buy
preformatted disks from DEC instead. A major exception was that the Heathkit
H-11 (an LSI-11/23 in Heathkit form) actually could format floppies under
HT-11, its variant of RT-11.

So much potential, and they blew it all on petty BS like that.

~~~
jacquesm
It's easy enough to see the mistakes of yesteryear in hindsight but there is
plenty of similar behaviour today.

Everybody that sells objects really yearns for a subscription model and
everybody that sells objects through a subscription model would like to have a
subscription based service model, and failing that they'd like some
advertising money to go with their other offerings. And some companies want
all of those at the same time.

~~~
WalterBright
Hindsight? Everyone knew that floppy thing was a mistake the moment it was
unveiled. People actually laughed.

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rbc
If you find getting a real PDP-11 too much trouble, consider using the SIMH
emulator:

[http://simh.trailing-edge.com](http://simh.trailing-edge.com)

SIMH does lack the visceral appeal of putting your hands on the console
though...

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madengr
Isn't this cheating? I thought the bootloader was supposed to be input in
using the toggle switches or keypad, and only then can you boot off paper
tape. Lazy kids these days.

~~~
cafard
The old DG Nova S/330s had switches, I recall, though the only ones I ever
dealt with booted from disk or magnetic tape.

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blt
Oh man, that 4th-to-last picture fills me with happiness. So old school. Is
that the drive head? Love the Vernier scale made out of PCBs. And the big-ass
cast iron parts. And the 1/4"-20 socket head bolts. And the ultra-sparse
through-hole PCB in the background. That picture made me so happy. Wish I had
been around back in the day to program one of the old machines.

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Taniwha
That's not how I remember it, somewhere you have to (occasionally because it's
real core) toggle in the bootstrap using the front panel switches .....

~~~
duskwuff
Is it possible you're thinking of the PDP-8? The PDP-11 didn't have switches;
it had a keypad (shown around halfway down the page), and could also have a
boot ROM (present on this machine).

~~~
flyinghamster
Some -11s (like the 11/20, 11/35, 11/45, and 11/70) had toggle switch front
panels. The 11/34 had the octal keyboard, and some systems like the 11/44
didn't have much more than a power switch.

My high school, back in the day, had an 11/34 running RSTS/E with a bunch of
terminals hanging off it. Our classes taught BASIC-PLUS and COBOL (actually
WATBOL), but no assembler.

The biggest irony? Back in 1980, my teacher was warning us about Year 2000
issues. Some years back, when I got a RSTS/E 7.0 system (the version that my
high school had) running on SIMH, I discovered that 7.0 wasn't Y2K compliant!

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mrintegrity
Interesting to see the origin of the UNIX "unmount" command being an actual
physical operation.

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jesuslop
It is the machine operated by the guy recruited by Travolta in "Swordfish" in
that fancy way, with that casual scene of Halle Berry and a hacker named
Torvalds; what a salad.

