[Info-vax] OT: obscure PDP11 OSes (even more dinosaury)

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-06-22 19:45, Dirk Munk wrote:
> Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2015-06-22 17:51, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
>>> Browsing around in our development system, I found a MAR
>>> file with the following as a comment at the top:
>>>
>>> ;
>>> ; FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION:
>>> ;
>>> ; DOWN_LINE_LOAD.
>>> ; THE ALLOCATED TT_LINE IS DEALLOCATED. A MAILBOX IS CREATED TO BE
>>> ; USED TO COMMUNICATE WITH A SUBPROCESS, WHO TAKES CARE OF
>>> ; THE COMMUNICATION WITH THE PDP-11/23 AND LOADS THE 11/23 WITH
>>> ; A RSX-11/S SYSTEM...
>>> ;
>>>
>>> So you could "load" a PDP with an RSX system over a serial line!?
>>> And the VMS system must have had a RSX-11/S "image" available?
>>>
>>> Maybe I read to much into that comment, they might just be saying
>>> that the PDP actualy is running a RSX-11/S system... :-)
>>
>> No, you understand this right. PDP-11s can downline load RSX-11S.
>> RSX-11S is a diskless system that needs a host to boot from.
>>
>> The host can can be either RSX-11M, RSX-11M-PLUS or VMS.
>>
>> The loading is done with MOP, and can be done over serial lines using
>> DDCMP, or over Ethernet.
>>
>>      Johnny
>>
>
> We had a PDP-11/05 that we loaded with paper tape. We also had non-DEC
> disk drives, and to format those we also had a bootable utility on paper
> tape.

That is something else than netbooted RSX-11S though. :-)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
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