18 May
2001
18 May
'01
11:30 a.m.
I'll try to remember. There was one RX02 drive. There was a TK50 tape
drive. There may have been a DSP800 drive. Most of the rest of the
space was RL02's. There were at least 3.
We probably have some spare RL02 platters and some TK50 tape cassettes.
System ran RSX-11M.
On Thu, 17 May 2001, Jerome Fine wrote:
M. K. Peirce
Rhode Island Computer Museum, Inc.
Shady Lea, Rhode Island
"Casta est quam nemo rogavit."
- Ovid
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