[rescue] Rescue a PDP

[Dave McGuire]

On July 17, Linc Fessenden wrote:
> I have an aquaintance that would like to donate a working PDP 11/34 (I
> think) in a 3' rack to me for my "collection".  Does this sound like a
> worthwhile deal?  I know just about nothing about these machines.  He says
> it run's rt-11 and some other OS which run's on top of rt-11..  What do
> you think?

  Uhh, FUCK YES!  Is "free" a worthwhile deal?  Always.  But this is
an 11/34, a damn nice pdp11.  One of these was my first "real" computer
many years ago.  They're wonderful machines.

  That OS that runs atop RT-11 would be TSX-PLUS.  RT-11 is a realtime
OS...good, but not what I'd call featureful or even very much fun.
It's not multiuser in the strict traditional sense, but it does
support background tasks.  TSX adds timesharing-like multiuser
capabilies to RT-11.  For Big Coolness you'd get either RSX-11M or
RSTS/E to run on there.  Those are both *sweet* OSs.  Later releases
of RSTS/E (v9 and up) can use DCL as the command shell, so it feels a
lot like VMS.

  What kind of disks are on this machine?

      -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd