Does anyone use RT-11?

[Christian Corti]

On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
> Yes that seems to be the goal, but what will you do with
> RT-11 at that point?  If playing games is the objective,
> then RT-11 is not really being used except to start the
> process.

I do this on our 11/10 with VT11/VR17 to play lunar lander (the visitors 
and especially children like it!).

> Based on the few responses, I guess that no one is writing
> any programs, let alone modifying any utilities.  And almost
> certainly, no one seems to be modifying device drivers or
> the operating system itself.  If anyone is actually interested
> in that aspect, please let me know.

Don't say that. My "main" PDP11 in our museum is a 11/34 with all sorts of 
peripherals. I've built a small interface to attach a PC to a DR11-C and 
wrote a RT-11 device driver (works in FB and XM). On the PC side I have 
virtual disk images of various sizes (up to 65536 RT-11 blocks) and on the 
RT-11 side I have up to eight devices that map to these disk images. 
Although the data path between the 11 and the PC is only 8 bits (I was too 
lazy to make it 16 bits, that would have required two latches and logic 
for multiplexing/demultiplexing) I achieve data rates of about 70kB/s. I 
can transfer whole RK05 disk images in less than one minute (that's btw. 
the reason why I built this interface) with COPY/DEV (in both directions).
And I can boot from the virtual disk...
The project isn't finished yet (no time, other projects, ...). The 
protocol needs to be more robust and fault tolerant, and I need to 
implement some kind of timeouts on both sides.

Ah, almost forgot that: Since there is no official way to format DECtapes 
under RT-11, I've enhanced the modified TC11 formatter from the spring '76 
sigtape to be verbose and tell the user what to do. I think this counts as 
"modifying utilities", doesn't it? :-)

Christian