DECtape archeology.

Mattis Lind mattislind at gmail.com
Fri Jan 12 04:22:53 CST 2018


I saw Pauls post about old DECtapes which reminded me about a bunch of
DECtapes I had lying here.

On my workbench I have a PDP-11/10 with TC11 and TU56 setup which works
nicely so I decided to image a few more DECtapes. For those interested in
old diagnostics and other things it can be worth looking into.

http://storage.datormuseum.se/u/96935524/Datormusuem/dectapes-1.tgz

Some comments:

I have not tried to boot any tape natively since my M9312 need a TC boot
PROM, need to burn one.
I have tried to boot most of them in SimH, but many of them fail with a
HALT somewhere. Need to test this further on real hardware as soon as I
have a TC bootstrap.

D1.DSK had an I/O Error so it is not the full dump.

D2.DSK however boots to a prompt:

DDP1-V001 28K RSTRT: 155766

.DIR


.

DIR    .BIN   003   17-NOV-71

DTCOPY .BIN   006   17-NOV-71

D0AA   .BIN   014   17-NOV-71


What is DDP1-V001? Some early diagnostics monitor? The filesystem seems to
be DOS-11 as RT-11 FILEX is able to read the directory with /S


D5.DSK is also a DOS-11 file structure and apart from quite some
diagnostics also contain FOCAL1.BIN


DT5.DSK contain a binary MOON.BIN which according to the label is some
variant of Moonlander / Lunarlander.



So, yes. I do have a system up and running that can Image that RSX11-D VT30
tape if needed. However it will be moved on the 27th of January.


/Mattis


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