Bill's PDP-11/34A (was Re: PDP-11/34A bring up (question about front panel))

[Ethan Dicks]

On 11/3/10, B Degnan <billdeg at degnanco.com> wrote:
> I don't want to hijack this thread except to say that I too just got an
> 11/34 last week.  I still need to clean it and learn more about what it
> was set to do, but I have a quick question about the front panel.  My
> system has a flat front panel without the white cover cut out resembling
> a mirror image of the US State of Delaware on it's side.  My system has
> a black front panel with a white rectangular frame around it instead.
> What is the origin of this variation?

I have never seen that mounting frame for the front panel, but perhaps
it's related to your "DEC DataSystem" cover panel.

Here's a photo I found googling around for "DEC Datasystem"

http://www.compuseum.at/portal/Computers/PDP1134/tabid/93/language/en-US/Default.aspx

> Here are pictures from the system as I first got it, if it helps with
> the card order/comparison purposes.  Note that some cards are not
> installed in the backplane.
> http://vintagecomputer.net/digital/pdp11-34a/before/

Do you have packs for your RL01 drives?  Hopefully the packs were
removed and the heads locked for transport.

An 11/34 w/RL01 is a nice little RT-11 system, though it'd be a bit
cramped for 2.9BSD (both in terms of disk and RAM).  You could
probably also run an older version of RSX-11/M on it too.  I think we
ran something around RSX-11/M 4.0 or 4.1 on ours in the mid-1980s.

-ethan