[Info-vax] Calay PCB CAD on PDP11/23

[Jürgen Hoffmann]

Well i searched my archives and found little that could be of use to
you. In addition most of it is in german language and i don't know
whether you undertand that.

You wrote, that you know little about both normal usage and low level
technical operation. I don't know, what you mean by "low level" but it
might interest you, that the underlaying operating system was RT-11,
one of DEC's standard operating systems for smaller PDP-11s at that
time. This operating system allowed a single user to run a single task
at a time, although there were flawors which allowed two tasks at a
time (called forground and background task) and later it could even
run up to eight tasks but it was still strictly single user. So there
was no logging in, no user management and no access rights.
Conceptionally it was similar to MS-DOS and even CP/M, even though the
details (mashine, instruction set, even the file system) was
completely different.

My memories about the "external graphic interface" are very vague and
i was never involved directly into that part of the system. But is it
such a 19" aluminium box? Is there perhaps even a label saying
something like "DATRON"? If so, then this was the manufacturer of the
graphic sub-system. The company is still around, even though they
nowadays make totally different products but perhaps there is still
someone who knows about the "old stuff"? You can find their web page
here: http://www.datron.de/