The PDP-11 Motherload!
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2024
- Just when you think a build can’t get any more wild, life will sometimes smile down on you and bestow you with the most wild and bananas haul imaginable. Mitch down in Houston had one of the most epic PDP collections ever and very kindly donated them to the channel! Now, it’s too much for one person, so I won’t be keeping it all, but there’s some really epic stuff in here, so come along as we dig in deep to Mitch hooked us up with.
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Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
ocremix.org/remix/OCR01847
Thanks for watching!
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:30 Time for a new plan!
3:47 Let’s unload and catalog
4:33 What did we get?
12:46 A little more disassembly and cleaning
13:44 So, what’s the plan here?
18:55 What about all the QBus stuff?
20:58 Kitties! - Наука та технологія
And this is the story on how the Centurion guy turned into the PDP-11 guy...
TBH PDP is more fun!
Nah.. I believe he’s always gonna be the Centurion guy, since she’s the only person on the planet whom seems to still own one of the systems.
I think you meant to say "turned into the Centurion + PDP-11 guy..."
@@sgermain06 "...he's the angry Atari/Sega nerd..."
@@user-xv9fe4eo1b i wish we could have more vaccum tube computer stuff. its so fun!
That truckload makes my eyes water. Thank you for preserving this DEC history and keeping it alive!
I spent years with a passionate desire to own a working PDP-11 system, only in the end to accept that I will never be able to do so. In fact, at this point, even if someone offered to give it to me for free, I couldn't afford the gas to go get it! Fortunately, I have you and your system to at least see one working again. Wishing you the very best in your magic you work in bringing these systems back to life! Thanks for sharing the videos with us!
There is nothing better than getting a cache of goodies into the hands of fellow enthusiasts! I do have a collection of vintage electrical stuff (not all is computer related), and years ago I was made aware of a cache of stuff up in Alaska that was 'free' if I could get it down to the lower 48. It took a bit of help from a fellow enthusiast in the Pacific Northwest, but I did accomplish what I set out to do, and the goodies were forwarded on to their eventual destinations over the next few months.
That is a DEC treasure trove. I fell in love with the PDP by ressurecting an 1976 3 axis CNC milling machine using a PDP 11/03 as a CNC controller. I had to learn the PDP ASM language to allow me to reverse engineer the firmware in order to fix and operate it because it didn't come with the complete documentation when I got it.
Back in the 80's some newspapers used PDP-11/84's for Editorial, classified and business systems, (rsx-11 with custom software)they used RA81 fixed disk, they are large like your centurion drive, also the ra60p removable disk cartridges, I recall when we had a head crash on those took the Dec techs 8 hours to put new heads and align them. they were using ethernet to connect to a Unix server and a Xenix server to typeset pages to a Laser Typesetter to paper (before desktop publishing days). Thanks for keeping the PDP's alive!
Xenix!! Interesting, thanks for sharing 😁
That’s an amazing haul of DEC equipment. I learned my professional programming on 11/70, 11/34, and smaller 11/08 machines. The 11/70 and 11/34s ran RSX-11 and I programmed in MACRO-11. We built a Supervisory system to manage the test floors at Mostek. It managed test program download to test machines and test result upload from the test machines to the 11/70. The 11/34s were concentrators shuffling data between the 11/70 and the test machines. The test machines were 11/08s augmented with subsystems that allowed DMA of test vectors to chips being tested. The 11/70 managed around 100 test machines. It also supported data analysis programs our product engineers wrote to monitor chip production KPIs. I started as a test engineer developing programs to test chips and worked my way up to systems programming on the 11/70 and 11/34. It was busy, hectic, and a helluva lot of fun. I too, had a nerdgasm when I saw what you’d brought home.
I'm literally *drooling* seeing all the VAX stuff and the DECtapes. As for the tapes: Please keep in mind that they tend to "stick". It seems it helps to give them (opened) a soft blow with a hair dryer and spinning them for a few rounds manually helps. Also, they have a quite unique driving belt, which is usually broken. :/
Oh, and the tape drive... Their friction drum is usually either guey / sticky or brittle-dry and needs a replacement.
@@jbglaw Yeah, those TK50s were pretty reliable but if they got dirty they would not behave and those belts did go. The TU58s where really reliable but sloooooow. I did a lot of updates on 11/750 machines and it took forever. I saw a DECTape II in the video but I didn't see a TU58. The 11/780 used a RX01 as console media which was actually a PDP-11/03 I seem to recall with the RX01. It's really cool that the VAX machines had the console media that could be different physical devices but always looked the same to the software.
pdp11/44 was the first real computer I programmed on. Learnt C under Unix on it at UCL. One of the 11/44's there provided all of the internet (Janet/Arpanet) connection between the Uk and the US at a wopping 9600 baud.
this was in 1978 - worked up to vax 11/780 and cray xmp4 and then downgraded to and 11/730 and microvaxes in the real world one I graduated.
I built and managed a DECnet node on Digital's network back in the mid 90s that was a MicroVAX II chassis. It was called NSYBOX (NoisyBox) and easy to see why when it was stuck under your desk! I often wish I had one to play with now that I'm appreciating the older technologies now. Good times.
Those who used the old stuff kept looking forward to the new, and thank God they did.
That cat has seen things...beautiful and wonderful things.
I’m younger than the VAX 11/780, the first model in the series, by about one year, but I just love them and the PDP-11 and -10. Not only one of the best retrocomputing channels on UA-cam but one of the best channels, period.
Wow, what a score!
The TU58 drive with one slot in front and one on the side is for the VAX-11/730. The front slot is available on the front panel for general use, and the side one is accessible on the right side of the chassis when slid out of the rack. The side slot is generally used for the boot tape, which loads the microcode into writable control store and then loads the appropriate bootstrap into VAX memory. If you do not have working drives and good tapes, then you can bootstrap the 11/730 with AK6DN's TU58 emulator. I contributed a patch to get it working with my 11/730.
I have a pile of parts to turn into an 11/44 or two someday, but that project has a long wait for the front burner.
Good one there.. 11/730 and 11/725, the "smallest" grownups VAXens (non-MicroVax) rated at only 0.25 VUPS (MIPS) where the 11/780 was 1.0 VUPS.. not very popular machines quickly killed by theVAX 11/750 and microVax-2.. some good info here: AA-M546C-TE VAX-11-725 and VAX-11-730 Software Installation Guide.pdf
Great post and subject.. love DEC forever!
It's been a long time since I built TK-50s and RX-50s, but I used to work at DEC. Happy to offer what info comes back to mind as it comes up. Fun to see!
Random story: I had friends at DEC Japan and when I visited the office they had a tape drive along a high traffic path. Every time you walked past the drive you were supposed to eject and then insert the tape. At 1 millions cycles they stopped and held an office party.
4:57 is a wild frame. the old muscle car, the boxes, the camera angle, all the circuit boards. its insane
Yay! My first job was as a systems manager of a Microvax II, glad to see one again. I remember being blown away walking onto a large office floor and seeing everyone connected and working towards it, even though it was a very slow and low spec'ed machine at the time in the early 90's. I remember the early internet was almost entirely driven from vaxes, mostly from Universities.
Heh, good old times, late 90s I actually had a VAX 11/750 and a PDP 23 and lots more crammed into my room, I was in my late teens, the 23 I got from the uni computerclub who had the newer 8k series VAXen and no interest or space for it.
I was in charge of the care and feeding of an 11/730 around 1982-85. It had an RL02, some hard drive I don't remember, and a Cipher 9track.
These computers are much more delicate than what we're used to now. It required very clean power and more importantly, air conditioning.
It put some real heat into the room.
I got to know the DEC service guy well, due to his visiting about every 4 or 5 months. The machine came with a BIG binder with
schematics and technical drawings for *that* particular machine. They were kept on-site and service guy would refer to and update the book.
He would sometimes use a wire wrap tool to make changes to the backplane. Even this simplest of Vaxen was stunningly complex.
The 11/44 is a whole 'nuther beast. Keeping it cool will be a challenge, as will matching the cards with that particular backplane.
On the other hand, when you showed the Centurion the first time, I had my doubts it would ever run, but you put in such hard work and here we are.
Like I said, the 11/44 is a beast. Not 11/780 beastial, but a beast nonetheless. A real number-cruncher in it's day. Should be an interesting year.
The 11/03 was a respectable small PDP-11 based on the LSI-11 chipset., it is used as a front end for the VAX-11/780 where it could run diagnostics on the 11/780 and then inject microcode and control the processor, now if you want a TTL machine nothing beats a VAX-11/780 with the entire VAX 32 bit processor implemented in TTL.
The PDP 11/70 was the first computer I ever used. It was running RSTS as the OS. The computer was housed on the campus of a government funded educational facility and many of the local and not so local high-school's had a DECwriter II that was attached to it through a 300 baud dedicated line. A student in one of the not so local to me school districts created this program that he called TANDEM which stood for (T)alking AND (E)xchanging (M)essagses and was basically an early chat-room/public & private message board system.
There was a program called TALK on our RSTS/E system. You could use it to annoy people. Every message was supposed to be prefixed with the user and terminal it came from, so that perpetrators could be tracked down and dealt with, but mischief-makers soon discovered that, if you typed enough backspaces, then your message would wipe out the user identification (just about everybody was on CRT terminals by this time). So the program was patched to reject messages with backspaces in them.
Then I discovered another loophole: you could put the terminal into TAPE mode (intended for reading paper tapes), which meant you could press RETURN and it would move back to the beginning of the line without ending the message, and you could overwrite the user identification that way. Then you pressed LF at the end of the line to actually send the message.
I used it as a student and then managed a "Student Timeshare" system for Los Angeles Unified School District in the late 70s - mid-80s. It was a PDP-11/70 running RSTS/E with 40 dial-up lines. The majority of the schools were still using 110 baud TTY terminals, but some had 300 baud DECwriters or CRT terminals. At that time, We had some brilliant folks poking around in the internals. We customized the WATCH driver (CRT functions) for TECO to support several different non-digital CRT terminals and customized VTEDIT macros for each version.
We also had a wonder package put together by student/alumni contributors called "Terminal Links," which allowed up to 7 users to connect their terminals together and view the shared output. A program variant called "Advise" allowed one terminal to send output to a second within the terminal link group.
@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Ah TALK..! Discovered TALK in early 80s on our local VMS server/node (at MEO DEC office). With nodename::username you could have a conversation over DEC's internal network on a split screen VT100. My very first conversation was with a lady in one of the DEC offices in France' chatting about the weather! IIRC by the time I left in 1992 there were 6-7000 nodes on the internal network and over 100,000 user!
I'm not a hater but for a guy who has been searching for a pdp anything for years and can't find anything yet here we go getting everything in 1 shot. Man.
I'll use it, I'm a medically retired principal computer systems engineer and a unix subject matter expert. I've always wanted my own PDP/11 and I'm working on building my own operating system as a hobby just like Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie did. I'm in Austin, Texas and I can pick it up.
I’m really happy that your are so enthusiastic about collecting vintage computer stuff, that way I don’t have to.
First PDP I ever used was an 11/44 in college, that led to a work placement where they had a VAX 11/730, so that was my first VAX. Waaaay back in 1985. I've never looked back. Welcome to the DEC family :D
16:29 Basically, decimal arithmetic. Possibly also some instructions for converting digit formats to various kinds that COBOL expects.
Hearing your voice 'wobble' reflects my sentiments exactly.
Congratulations....and off down the rabbit hole we jump! This is going to be awesome 🤟
Will be following your 11/44 adventure - I've got a 5-cabinet version of one myself!
I always remember that DEC cards were so well built and just oozed quality - even down to the metal card releases.
Phewy with this "modern" stuff. My brother used to work on PDP-1s in his college and it was good enough for him. That was state-of-the-art back them. 🙂
I am not sure what I love more, your attitude of getting these into the hands of other enthusiasts, or the fact your other other ride is an Austin Healy!
That is one seriously amazing treasure trove of parts. You could easily spend a ton of time just testing parts, let alone playing with various configurations and software.
If I ever had the chance to get a bunch of parts like that, I wouldn't even be able to bring much home. I'd have to go build a shed beforehand just to store it all.
I had a VAX11/730 as my home computer in my late teens. It took 20mins to load the microcode from tape to give the VAX instruction set - wonderful days! VAX 8350 is awesome beast for the time had true SMP and the backplane BI was a precursor to PCI the BI boards were smart with a section on the board dealing with bus communication.
Ah, wonderful stuff. I started my s/w dev career on DEC, with PDP-11, DEC-10 and VAX. And I did several years of assembly language programming on VAX 11/780 and 11/750. And I had an RL02 working with a Sinclair QL home computer some years later.
Glad to see all that wonderful vintage hardware being saved. The VAX 8350 bus with the ZIF sockets is known as the "BI" bus. It was a successor to UNIBUS and Q-BUS but unlike the earlier busses it required proprietary DEC silicon for the interface. BI was used as the system backplane on the 8200/8300 series machines, and as an I/O bus on the 8800 that came out at the same time.
I think DEC’s BI and Massbus were locked down with patents and required licensing if you wanted to make compatible hardware. Unlike the earlier Unibus and Q-Bus, which were pretty much free for the taking.
That's a whole herd of VAXen you have there! Yes, that is the official plural from DEC. I hope whoever gets the MicroVAX has a UA-cam channel so we can enjoy that rebuild. My first W2 job out of college involved programming the MicroVAX to create the command files for robots to autoinsert electrical components into circuit cards in fab plants. I also did some device drivers. If you truly want to learn what inspired Windows NT OS internals you can start with its father, the MicroVAX... ;) Best...
It did more than inspire it. Microsnot got Dave Cutler, the guy that wrote VMS to essentially port it to x86 and called it WindozeNT.
@@Sven_Dongle Correct.
Cutler was one of the nest of Unix haters at DEC (up to and including CEO Ken Olsen himself), and he carried that philosophy over into Windows NT.
Just thing how differently things might have turned out, if NT could have included just a few Unix-type ideas ...
That tape port on the side I am 90% sure is for a tape robot, they were pretty common since a single tape often does not have enough storage for a full backup of an organisation, so instead of swapping a tape every 15-30 minutes, you would load a long tray of tapes and switch them out with another tray at a set interval, like every Friday or something in that order, and the software would load backups to the tapes automatically, the front one could sometimes be for doing incremental backups more frequently.
Oh man, I can feel how stoked you are, this is becoming one of the best retro-computing channels in UA-cam.
11/44s came with Massbus by default, they expected to have RP04s or RP06es - An RL02 on an 11/44 would have been considered too small for one. 44s were one of the fastest PDP-11s.
Also note that if your 11/44 has a RH11 in it, you *CAN NOT* use the RH11 slots as normal Unibus slots, you will make things go bang if you try!
I don't think that 11/44 had MASSBUS by default. Now, if you said that they have SDI by default (for RA70, RA81, etc), I would agree.
@@pdp11henkie Before the UDA50 they were sold with RH11s unless the customer specified otherwise. Mine had a RH11 and was later field-upgraded to UDA50. The 11/44 was introduced in 1979, the MSCP protocol wasn't introduced until 1981 or 1982.
As I mentioned before: when I worked for the Dutch public packet switching network Datanet1 we used PDP11s for managing the network switching nodes and the BTMC ) Alcatel hardware was directly connected to the Unibus bus .. so the pdp11s talked directly to the dps1500 hardware without conversion interfaces etc
Good old times 👍👍🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🦆🦆
A great donation, the 11-44 is a great and fast machine! It does have some quirks such as a very complex power supply and get this some of the strangest fans you will ever see, 70 Hz AC fans! The machine will really shine using an OS like RSX-11 M+ but you would need to get the RA-70's Running for that. With the DSD dual floppy subsystem, you can run RT-11 on the machine.
I have several complete PDP-11 units with terminals printers and ALL OPTION cards. These units are loaded out with all the top options. Available in Pittsburgh PA. Message me if you are interested. This was two or three complete systems including the tape drives and hard disk units.
Color me intrigued!
My brother actually lives in Pittsburgh, and I will be driving right through after VCF East. Sen me an email at Nakazoto at gmail dot com and let's chat!
The MicroVAX made me groan because decades ago I worked for a place that wanted write a bunch of new modern applications to work with an SQL database. Management's only criteria for the SQL database product we needed to buy was that it had to be very very cheap. The cheapest one they could find only ran on VMS and of course all of our applications ran on Unix. No matter. The company (on the other side of the Atlantic!) promised to port their database server to Unix, but until then we had to run their server on a MicroVAX running its version of VMS. We didn't know anything about VMS so we screwed the machine up at least once a week.
Eventually the project was cancelled, the British company hadn't ported a single line of their code to Unix (smart), and for years and years we had a MicroVAX sitting unplugged in the back of our main computer room collecting dust. Memories!
Nice. As a collector I enjoy your videos a lot. Greetings from Switzerland
I haven't even watched past 3 minutes of this video and I've already had my first nerdgasm. 🤓You lucky, LUCKY bastard! What a PDP and VAX haul you got! At one time this stuff was valued in the millions of dollars! I am jawdropped in awe, and I can't wait to see what you do with all this DEC glorious goodness!
I hope it includes Unix. There was an effort to port Linux to 16 bits, but that never completed. Torvalds created Linux for sake of 32 bits when legal feuds held up Unix, so to be fair it wasn't intended for 16 bits. But at an AT&T company I found the PDP11 to be a sturdy little UNIX workhorse, in a mode that allocated 64k to program and data apiece.
But Unix made the programming model possible that Linux and GNU replicated, so in the PDP11 with Unix (which I believe AT&T eventually made free) we have the grandfather of a lot. It would seem sacrilege to me NOT to get Unix on this beast if it was at all possible. Unix really ennobled the PDP11, and its BSD descendants and later AT&T UNIX support helped sell VAXes (though to be fair both had excellent proprietary DEC environments too).
Yeah. Get a VAX next, lol.
I think PDP-11 Unix never had the advanced memory management capabilities that were added in the 1980s, simply because its MMU hardware was too primitive to cope.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 With the amount of Unix software written for the PDP and VAX lines, I am pretty confident that Unix will be installed once our man gets the mass storage squared away.
Having Ethernet gear for your DEC systems is pretty cool.
DEC is actually the reason Ethernet is a standard. Ethernet was invented at Xerox PARC by Bob Metcallfe and then DEC went to Metcallfe and said "Can you make us a LAN system". Metcallfe said no (on the grounds that it would be difficult to make a LAN system that avoided the Xerox Ethernet patents and avoid being sued by Xerox) and instead suggested they ask Xerox to license Ethernet. Ended up with Xerox, DEC and Intel (who would make chips for the cards) getting together and creating the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard.
DEC were also responsible for boosting the speed. The original Xerox Ethernet ran at 3Mb/s; DEC insisted it be pushed up to 10Mb/s.
It's just nice to see that this minicomputer stuff is now available enough to where it can get preserved by people who will actually use it, rather than doomed to a museum exhibit never to see electrons again.
FYI the PDP-11/20, 11/05, 11/34, and later 11/23 were often used in one of the first computer-based video editing systems the CMX system bade by CMX system which was a collaboration between CBS Laboratories and Memorex. Later Ampex would introduce the ACE video editing system based on the 11/73 along with the Alex CG system based on an 11/73.
Dood you're living one of my longstanding dreams. I'm all but literally sitting here drooling. I've wanted to [re]build my own mini/super computer since like the late 70's early 80's, though at the time CRAY was the thing, now my mind is on PDP-8e. Unfortunately I have neither the money nor the space for such a thing so I'll have to enjoy watching you play with the pdp-11.
Nice to see an 11/44 again. Used to rock one of those in one of my early jobs back in the 80s, also including a 1/4" tape drive, a couple of RX 8" disk drives and four CDC 9762 removable hard drives (swapped out later for CDC 9766 drives and finally by a custom SCSI drive with DAT backup). Thought it was a bit weird to refer to the 11/73 as a "late model" PDP-11 but I suppose it depends on where you draw the line. Mind you, if you think the 11/44 was weird in its construction, just wait until you encounter a PDP-11/70!!
Impression about the situation. Don't give away too much. Keep spares of irreplaceable parts!
Impression about the outro: Nice heap of kitties!
Impression about the video: Wow, blasts from the past!
Back around 1998 or so, I worked with a guy whose sofa was flanked by interesting lamp tables - the cases of dead MicroVax II's.
Around 1991, after a job change, I had a MicroVax II in my office. It was a tremendous step down from the SparcStation that I'd had at a previous job.
That little desktop cage is just like a data acquisition system that I worked on in 1985 or so. It ran RT-11 and basically all it did was capture D/A signals, run some digital filtering, and dump them out on tape for processing with some massive Fortran thing on a mainframe. (I just had a short-term gig tweaking the digital filters and the signal conditioning circuits, so I never learnt what was under the hood on the mainframe thing.)
That 11-03 reminds me of the chassis that held the PDP 11 unit that sat inside of the Vax 11/780 mainframe. I think it's the same one that was used, although the last time i saw one was 25 years ago... I do still have the black metal rack mount enclosure that the 4-space backplane fit into... (iirc, the PDP-11 that sat inside of the VAX 11/780 was used as kind of a supervisor system that actually booted the 11/780
Usagi Electric: Your Minicomputer Specialist. Wotta haul, man! You are doing well to share the wealth, too. (I'm really surprised that you let the VAX hardware go...) Next thing you look at should probably be some HP-UX gear... (it's still very marketable to paper mills and other industrial users). I'll be watching, and hoping for great things here.
I used to have a PDP 11/23 years ago when I was a student, it's quite handy due to size and flexibility, it's less obscure/picky in what it will and not work with than some earlier machines are. It can also run some obscure RT OS setups that only work on a few configs but for its size it's louder than I expected. I just built up a single cabinet roller with it and two drives I forget the models of, was a fun setup to play with. You sure have enough to keep you busy for quite some time there hehe. Good luck, I hope you get much of it going and that the new homes for some of it treat it well 🙂.
3:03 Wow… This is fantastic! For you and the channel sure, but also for history itself! Humbled by your great work and the value of sharing it all… 👍
Hi , I was A pdp11 System engineer for publising Atex HAd a memory mapped crt and terminals were nothing but serial with large keyboards and vidio back from frame 16 each pdp. all linked by a common mmu box sharing 4 k of ram. I could look at a terminal miles away and if I wanteded control it. It was awsume. were talking about all news papers , atlanta constution news 16 frames . so alot of terminals. incomming wire sorteded, eveven certin tag words per editor at news paper. I goes beond this theres clasified adds. thats where I got involved so many actions for it. Some wrote macros for certin formats for magazines ad formatted text for that pub. Jake was the master of that.
This brings back memories from long time ago ...
I once bought, what I was told to be, one PDP11 from a local company who was updating it's computing stuff for the price of 5 USD
Well ... I ended up with 1.5 PDP11/44, two PDP8 systems, a bunch of I/O cards for the PDP8 (that was used to control some machine), an RL02, RX02 and an ASR33 Teletype. This was all in the before internet era so we had a lot of fun discovering how to get all this running. Too bad I had to let go of this stuff when I moved to a much smaller space, I still miss playing around with this stuff.
Nice! Now for a DEC terminal with a "working gold key" lol. Seeing DiBol running again would be sweet.
So great to see so much love for DEC on this channel. My DEC experience was mostly with micro-VAXes & VMS from 1993, with DEC PCs to run Windows or boot as a terminal to the VAX. This transitioned into VAX Alphas with VT terminals and a few graphics terminals. Going to site with huge TK-50 tapes, then DATs or flopticals. So sad when in about 2002 the company I worked for and transitioned to Windows, which was fortunate considering what Compaq and HP did to DEC.
You need one of the famous PDP-11/70's with the pink and purple toggle switches.
"... started unloading the truck... categorizing...."
"... four days later..."
😂
YMMD!
Awesome stuff. I’ve never been into or experienced DEC hardware except for the VT220 terminal I have. Early days of learning to program at Uni were done on VT220 terminals, but they was attached to 1990s HP hardware running UNIX.
I am very much looking forward to learning all about the PDP systems in future videos.
You need to get an VT100 terminal to go with all those PDP-11's! None of this Wyse or Televideo "VT100 compatible" rubbish -- you need a real DEC VT100! 😁
I worked for a Fortune 10 company that I was told at one time was DEC's biggest commercial customer. I am very DEC ignorant but I know this company was a pioneer in using beaucoup PDPs for process control and lab computing. Years after I left I talked to one of the plant IT guys and he told me they were still running ancient PDPs for mission critical systems.. They were resorting to scouring EBAY and other sites for PDP parts to keep the plants running. Sometimes afterward he related that lack of tech refreshes finally bit them in the ass causing manufacturing outages. The company eventually canned almost all of the IT staff blaming them for 'not escalating the issue'.
1:56 "Scrapping vintage electronics makes my soul hurt" ❤
@tradde11 yes i did notice and edit that, thankyou though
It's going to be a great series! You are doing great stuff restoring these old machines! Greets from Poland 🙂
That RA70 brought back bad memories, I had one sitting on a shelf, about 6 feet up, fall once and land on my foot while I was wearing sandals. I am fairly certain that I broke a couple bones in my foot when that happened.
I worked ar the Augusta ,ME Digital/SCI/Sanmina plant until they closed it. I remember alot of these parts and whole systems still working. I didn't have any involvement with these wonderful computers. I wish I did now!
You know it's special when you need a pickup and tie-down straps!
And fill the cab too!
Used to use a Vax 11-750 when I was a trainee back in the late 1980's. It had 3 unit like what you got in the background and a CPU cabinet (with tape cartridge drive). It had 1 RA60 removable disk pack, tape drive and full size 2 fixed drives
This should be a fun series of vids. I have a PDP-11/84 in the basement that gets stuck part way through the startup process. It doesn't help that I don't have any drives or drive controllers, but the process hangs up before it gets to the point of looking for a boot device. It got shoved into a corner because I didn't have the time or resources to deal with it then, but it would be nice to dig it out and give it another go.
We had a PDP-11/44 as one of our departmental computers (running Unix). Yes, the CPU chassis has to go in the top of the rack. The reason it flips up is to make accessing the power supply connectors easier when you have to swap out a supply. Also, be aware that there were several different versions of the console firmware, later versions of which fixed problems that we discovered (and added features that we wanted), but these upgrades are not necessarily documented in publicly available manuals. Also, if I remember correctly, certain slots in the first section of the backplane were dedicated for specific functions (that is, specific CPU cards) such as the cache card, the FPU card, and so on Thus, that backplane is not a standard Unibus backplane - it is unique to the CPU.. Other than that, all subsequent backplane sections should be standard Unibus. As usual, use the DEC-recommended order of installing peripheral cards to ensure maximum overall system performance, and don't forget the Bus Grant jumper cards in empty slots,
8350 is roughly 2x the speed of the uVAX-II which is approximately ~1VUP (VAX Unit of Performance ..relative to an 1978 era 11/780). People say it's "One VAX MIP" but it's closer to 500-600,000 instructions/second. Compare that with your 8bit systems to get a relative instruction throughput/perspective. It's not "that" new. They're very cool unibus/vaxbi systems. They can even run NetBSD, not just Ultrix and VMS. VAXen are essentially a 32bit extension of the 16bit -11 ISA. Anything that is a VAX-11/xxx means it has pdp-11 mode. They were thinking ahead with the -11 and designed the ISA to be extremely orthogonal. Please trust me, whilst you love 8bit and 16bit systems, the VAXen are a truely wonderful universe in their own and are a lineage of the -11's. Honestly, there's several dozen of your videos there without trying. :) Pleased don't discount the other non-11 gear. Investigate every card/system before you re-home it. It's all such a wonderful universe. 😁 Pity your not in Australia. I have a couple of spare RL02's. I'm only using one and have spares. Keep an eye out for SCSI qbus cards that talk MSCP and config via DUP. It'll be super convenient for getting O/S's up and interrogating various other storage adapters.
Oh my god, I've just found this channel, you have a new subscriber. I used to use a DEC PDP-11 on a system labelled Racal Redac Maxi for designing PCB's in the 80's. It was 3 full heigh cabinets with two old dustbin lid hard drives. Happy days.
The 11/23 brings back a few memories, my first job after graduating was getting an 11/23 set up with IEEE 488 instruments and some Fourier analysis for a research lab at my university.
Wow! I haven't seen a microvax II since about 1991... person who sat opposite me in the office had one to use as his personal machine... me? Jealous? ... well YEAH!
Sorry for many many comments... but I was a massive DEC fan boy back in the day... and this is getting me over excited.
Those cute little kitties at the end just love your new primative old stuff! 😻
Holy smokes! It'll take a lifetime or two to go through and set all of it up. Glad you shuffled off some hardware to others.
Thank you so much for all of the amazing videos! Your excitement makes my day and I look forward to your content every week.
Ooh, what's that sweet car behind you at 4:38? Aww, cute kitty too! That's quite the haul, and that's not even all of it!
In geology, a lode is a deposit of metalliferous ore that fills or is embedded in a fissure (or crack) in a rock formation or a vein of ore that is deposited or embedded between layers of rock. Mother lode is a principal vein or zone of gold or silver ore. The term is also used colloquially to refer to the real or imaginary origin of something valuable or in great abundance. You could glom those words together informally. Motherload is an online game.
I am positively green with envy. I've wanted a pdp for a few years now. Also, It strikes me that these pdp 11s are a lot like ford model t's. There were all sorts of different models produced that have also, in turn usually been heavily modded to fit the particular owners need. Keep up the good work!
9:02 As I recall the product naming, the models named “VAX-11/7xx” still had the PDP-11 compatibility mode, which was able to directly run (some) binaries compiled for the RSX-11 OS. The later models dropped this mode, and the “-11” suffix. So you had the 8xxx models. These were later replaced with the 6xxx models (higher performance, notwithstanding the lower model numbers).
Somewhere in-between those two, I think, there was a 9000 model. This was trying to push the limit in performance from the VAX architecture, but was not a big success.
When I was made redundant from a Burroughs site (they switched to Eunuchs!) I ended up working for a paint company that used twin 6660s. From what I was told, the third "6" meant a six-cpu machine. They could apparently take 8 CPUs, but for some reason, DEC wouldn't support 8 CPUs. If your system played up they'd ask "How many CPUs?" If you said "8" DEC would tell you to disable the extra CPUs. I'm actually wondering if that wasn't because if you were paying for 6, and you bought the additional CPUs from someone else, they wouldn't want to know you. They started switching bits of the operations to Alpha machines before I left and started working on Tandems. Still love the Burroughs, though :)
I'm tearing up with nostalgia! 😢😁
Very exciting that you have CIS support. Somewhere out in the DECUS archives is a utility that uses that instruction set to accelerate arbitrary precision math. Ever wanted to see if you can calculate Pi to the most decimal places? find that utility and just let-er-rip. Forget word size, forget floating point approximation, you have the tools to automate calculations of some very very very big numbers.
Or, just parse enormous amounts of written text.
Your old man's commitment to the stache is strong. Respect.
Back in 1999 I de-commissioned a PDP/11. Someone wanted the main chassis so it went to a good home. But no-one wanted the fully working RL02 or tape drive and they went in the skip. I still feel bad about that.
I would love to see a telnet BBS set up on a PDP11
Please set up another channel where you just endlessly show those cats.
Fun watching the bed of the truck rise slowly as it's unloaded. They built kit solid back in the day.
Whoa, you are a lucky man. I can't wait to ear the sound of the 11-44 😀
Had a buddy who was the head systems administrator for a small college. He ran their whole class sign-up system on VAX machines into the early 2010s. He called it security through obscurity. Then he'd descend into a rant about script kiddies... 🤣
Thanks for sharing, cool stuff, good luck to you with a new project. Only several days ago I was writing an article about PDP-11, and I was testing Unix v7, v8 and BSD 2.11, alas in the simulator only :) Just too large and too expensive to have it in the apartment, so it was fun to see all this hardware in real, not only as config lines in SimH :)
Man love your channel your the most hardcore pc restorer I watch and mainframes are beyond me thats some next level
Nice score. All I have for a PDP-11 is a q-bus CPU card and two third party ram-modules. On top on every board is one component missing. And part for PDP-11s are expensive. A q-bus backplane alone cost more than 100€ (like every thing else).
What a fantastic find!
That truckload--holy SHIT! WHAT A HAUL! WOW!
that was something ..i have never seen nor heard of any of that hardware before ..like the other tech here ..lol...but so kool to see and hear how it was done back in the day ..looking forward ..to seeing it all run :)
You should buy some moving blankets (harbor freight has them cheap) to help protect stuff when moving - all those pieces were clattering around in the back of your pickup!
This is all super neat stuff that I know nothing about. Great video content
Holy sugarballs, what an amazing find. Looks like you're gonna have to expand your shop again...