3 Oct
2002
3 Oct
'02
2:44 a.m.
I probably have the room, but not the inclination. I
am
really a software person - the hardware is just there to
run the software - well mostly - my wife certainly would
not agree when she she looks at the basement full of
PDP-11 junk.
Ahh, but that merely takes a quick
#ifdef WIFE
# undef WIFE
# define WIFE GEEK_WIFE
#endif
to fix... :)
As for using the RL02 and RK05 drives, while I have
one RK05 drive at the moment and a borrowed RKV11-D
(THANK YOU Ethan Dicks - which I am close to being
finished with) to recover some RK05 packs I obtained
last year in Montreal, I would NEVER consider using the
RL02 drives, let alone the RK05 drive, as a production
unit to fix software bugs, etc. So if I really want to run
some code which can only be run using an RK05 device
driver under RT-11, I would use Ersatz-11 and run the
code on a PC under Windows 98 SE/Ersatz-11. About
the only problem is that it will run TOO FAST - about
15 times the speed of a PDP-11/93 right now and
eventually I hope to get to 50 times the speed of a
PDP-11/93 when a high end Pentium 4 is cheap enough.
I do all my Ultrix-11
development under E11 too, simple
because (a) it's a hell of a lot faster, and (b) I can
take Falcon (the "machine") with me, including its four
RA82 drives and all the others. :)
Still.. I do try make sure it still runs (acceptably) on
Real Hardware as much as possible. Which usually means
teaming with retrogeek-friends for Yet Another retro-session.
(did I mention the WIFE issue already? They usually seem to
have issues with these sessions, too.. duuno why ;-)
So... OK. I probably would not run a bunch of RP's for fun
anymore. However, I have friends ['lo, ed ;-] that do, soo... :)
--fred