I should have mentioned its not small. The basic 2 disk machine is a 1.2m rack. I normally stack the 3rd disk and floppy on top, making a 5 foot rack. In my box of bits there maybe some MicroVax cpus as well. Theres also a few backplanes, so you can probably build a 2nd or 3rd machine. There is also a real DEC VT100 And for those of you who think "in car computers" (&MP3 players) are cool, I had an in car PDP-11 probably before you were born. rich - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
At 10:09 AM +1300 1/20/03, Richard Naylor wrote:
And for those of you who think "in car computers" (&MP3 players) are cool, I had an in car PDP-11 probably before you were born.
Cardboard box? YOU WERE LUCKY! :^) -- Andrew P. Gardner barcelona.com stolen, stmoritz.com stays. What's uniform about the UDRP? We could ask ICANN to send WIPO a clue, but do they have any to spare? Get active: http://www.tldlobby.com - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
At 03:19 p.m. 19/01/2003 -0600, Andy Gardner wrote:
At 10:09 AM +1300 1/20/03, Richard Naylor wrote:
And for those of you who think "in car computers" (&MP3 players) are cool, I had an in car PDP-11 probably before you were born.
Cardboard box?
YOU WERE LUCKY!
there used to be a TI Silent 700 on the back seat. This was before "portable" teletypes like the LA34. It was silent as it was a thermal device. Problem was Westinghouse couldn't afford the thermal paper and that annoying problem with it missing the first character on each line. When you're debugging in machine code thats a real bugger !! But then I recall debugging Decnet/ddcmp with a scope on a 19.2k serial line. That was unreal as BT had'nt approved our 1200bps modems at that stage. 19.2 k devices were very fast and expensive. When I say debugging, it was teh firmware in the remote hardware. We built our own interfaces. r - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
IS this machine one of those used for the wcc freenet? I seem to remember some talk about kosmos being given to someone who would appreciate it etc but I could be mistaken Lin On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Richard Naylor wrote:
I should have mentioned its not small. The basic 2 disk machine is a 1.2m rack. I normally stack the 3rd disk and floppy on top, making a 5 foot rack.
In my box of bits there maybe some MicroVax cpus as well. Theres also a few backplanes, so you can probably build a 2nd or 3rd machine.
There is also a real DEC VT100
And for those of you who think "in car computers" (&MP3 players) are cool, I had an in car PDP-11 probably before you were born.
rich
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At 10:41 AM +1300 1/20/03, Lin Nah wrote:
I seem to remember some talk about kosmos being given to someone who would appreciate it etc but I could be mistaken
I think I saw it high up on the racks at that computer auction place in Wainuiomata, but that would have been 1998-99 so it may not be there any more. Ahhh Kosmos, my introduction to the Internet. Anyone remember those $20 1200/75 modem cards for sale in that surlus place in Lambton Quay? :^) -- Andrew P. Gardner barcelona.com stolen, stmoritz.com stays. What's uniform about the UDRP? We could ask ICANN to send WIPO a clue, but do they have any to spare? Get active: http://www.tldlobby.com - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 10:09, Richard Naylor wrote:
I should have mentioned its not small. The basic 2 disk machine is a 1.2m rack. I normally stack the 3rd disk and floppy on top, making a 5 foot rack.
But you will be able to run Unix on it if you can find a copy of the right software. This machine will run Bell Labs 6th and 7th edition quite happily. You should also be able to get BSD 2.9 to work on it if you can find sources for any of them. You are likely to need a tape drive to bootstrap the process unless you can find floppies with the sources on them. I also cut my programming teeth on machines like this. My first ever UNIX program was one which had to work out details of the byte architecture on this and other devices we were likely to run Unix on i.e. was the machine big or little endian, what was the order of the bytes in a short and in a long. I had never seen a C struct or union before but it was a good learning experience. I worked a research project which produced a software system that build a distributed Unix system called the Newcastle Connection. See http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/old/events/anniversaries/40th/webbook/distributed/sr... We ran 2 PDP 11/45 machines at Newcastle University (Serial nos 2006 and 2007) and three 11/23 machines running 7th Edition connected with 10 Mb/sec Cambridge Ring. We had to write our own comms system. See http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/old/research/trs/abstracts/193.html You will find many familiar programs on the 7th edition system - we used emacs and ed as our editors. This explains why I subscribe to the "you can't spell 'vile' without using 'vi'" camp and by that stage I was an emacs user. For those who describe 'emacs' as 'eight megs and constantly swapping' I can state this was not true in those days. We didn't have eight Megs of anything on the smaller systems - the has disc on the 11/23s was 5M and the Unix kernel had to be smaller than 56K in size. We didn't have vi until we had our first VAXes and BSD 4.2 I have a list of other programs but things like login, passwd, cat, dd, rm, ln (no -s option), mv, sh, ps, date, mount, mkfs, fsck, mail were all present. Even though there is an Ethernet interface TCP/IP networking may be more problematic. This machine and ones like it are important historically and should be preserved just as much as some of the other stuff held at Te Papa as they mark landmarks in our geek heritage! - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
Andy Linton
But you will be able to run Unix on it if you can find a copy of the right software. This machine will run Bell Labs 6th and 7th edition quite happily. You should also be able to get BSD 2.9 to work on it if you can find sources for any of them. You are likely to need a tape drive to bootstrap the process unless you can find floppies with the sources on them.
If it's an 11/73, it'll happily run 2.11 BSD. Check out http://minnie.tuhs.org/PUPS/ for stuff on running Unix on pdp11s.
emacs user. For those who describe 'emacs' as 'eight megs and constantly swapping' I can state this was not true in those days. We didn't have
Actually, no pdp11 could have more than 4MB (actually 4MB - 8KB for the I/O page) without some seriously non-standard hardware.
Even though there is an Ethernet interface TCP/IP networking may be more problematic.
2.11 BSD ethernets and TCP/IPs just fine. Oh, and of course a pdp11 is a 16 bit machine in pretty much every way that matters. This *will* cramp the style of anyone brought up with "modern" programming techniques... -- don (who also cut several molars on pdp11s, but running RSTS/E, not Unix.) - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
Hi all: Christophe Diot from Sprint Advanced Technology Labs will be visiting Auckland in mid-February. He's volunteered to give a seminar at the University of Auckland at 12 p.m. on Tuesday 18 Feb 03. The title is Measurement effort at Sprint: performance data from AS 1239 See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/seminars/ for more details. If you're interested in network measurement, or in how one large ISP backbone is managed, and you're in Auckland City around the middle of that Tuesday, you're very welcome to attend. I'll post a reminder note about this talk closer to 18 Feb, giving details of how to find our new Computer Science Seminar Room! Cheers, Nevil ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Nevil Brownlee Director, Technology Development Phone: +64 9 373 7599 x88941 ITSS, The University of Auckland FAX: +64 9 373 7021 Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through University of Auckland http://www.auckland.ac.nz/ - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog
participants (6)
-
Andy Gardner -
Andy Linton -
Don Stokes -
Lin Nah -
Nevil Brownlee -
Richard Naylor