PDP-11/Booting

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PDP-11/Booting @ Trammell Hudson’s Projects.

You want to play Adventure, but don’t know how to turn on the PDP-11? These instructions are for booting our dual rack machine from its RL01 drives, although booting the single cabinet machine from the RK05 is very similar.


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4 Comments

  1. adafruit_support_bill

    That’s not how I remember it!

    First you write your bootloader in assembly language
    Hand compile the code into octal
    Convert that to binary
    Solder the appropriate diodes onto the M792 diode ROM boot board
    Plug the board into the Unibus backplane
    Power up the system and go. (it’s that easy!)

  2. Really cool, are people still using these? I had one with two 20mB Winchester Harddrives. Really old school but so cool ( or shoul dI see warm because I could turn off the heat in my room when it was running, and what about the noise it made, hahahaha)

  3. Hate to admit this, but back in 1980 i cut my teeth in assembly programming on a PDP11-70. My electronic Machines class final was trouble shooting a problem on an IBM key punch machine, All Relays, the teacher coated one relay feeler in clear nail polish and put it back in place. Turned on the machine and cards streamed out!!. had to fix in an hour with a DVM, a scope and the manual. Needless to say, i passed…..

  4. Tim in San Diego

    At work I still have a MicroVAX 3100 Model 80, running VAX/VMS 6.2, and hosting an Ada cross compiler for an embedded target. It’s doing a compile and link as I type this.

    I have a collection of SCSI drives and VT-xxx terminals (need one for system console) in case anything breaks, and image backups on TK50 and 8 mm DAT.

    Ken Olsen: RIP, and thanks for the most reliable, best documented, multi-user, multi-tasking demand paged virtual memory clusterable operating system the world has ever had.

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