17 May
2001
17 May
'01
10:37 p.m.
Merle K. Peirce wrote:
We visited Syosset, NY to pick up a Datamaster that
Rich Cini gave us,
and this morning receieved a frantic e-mail about some DEC equipment in
Danvers. The owning company was transferring some of its operations to
Texas, and we were given what amounted to a small DEC computer room -
platters, tapes, platter cabinets, a CDC 9762 drive, a micro-Vax, a
PDP-11/53, and a 3-cabinet PDP11/83, plus a large number of orange and
grey manuals.
Jerome Fine replies:
I have access to a PDP-11/83 in a BA123 cabinet. Although the ESDI hard
drives run outside the box due to cooling problems, unless I added a cabinet
for some RL02 drives just for compatibility, what could an 11/83 consist of
that would need 3 cabinets? Also, which OS were the PDP-11 systems
running? And anything available to be shared or sold?
I guess that if the 11/83 was very old, a few tape drives and RA81s could
occupy even more than 3 cabinets. I guess I am thinking in terms of hardware
which is just 10 years old. Those ESDI hard drives are 600 MBytes each
and are only the 5 1/4" full height drives on a Sigma RQD11-EC controller.
Even Seagate put out the ST8760E more than 10 years ago.
Of course, the actual real hardware 11/83 rarely gets any use now that
the a Pentium III can run all that code at ten times the speed of the 11/83.
What will happen when we switch to a Pentium IV running at 1.7 GHz.?
Note that I am not saying the Pentium IV is better - only that it ends up
running the programs written for the real PDP-11 hardware so much
faster that it is no longer efficient to develop and test code on the 11/83
except for a final checkout just to say it has been tested on the actual
real PDP-11 system.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine