Hi all,
Do sources exist for a MACRO-11 assembler for UNIX? The only package I
have found is written in MACRO-11 and relies on a provided binary to
regenerate itself; it's on the brl.pdp11 archive on the CSRG DVD.
-Henry
I still have two 19" racks with the main components of the PDP-11/45,
built in 1972, on which we started using UNIX 5th Edition in late summer
1974. Later it ran 6th and 7th Ed. CPU with front panel w. switches and
lamps, RK03 cartridge disk (2.5Mb!), floating point processor board
(serial number 1), several core memory banks among which 8K ones,
DEC-tape, ASR33-TTY, dozens of mini-lightbulbs, not a single LED. Its
hour-meter has clocked 122532: that's 13,97 years.
It is complete but doesn't run. I remember from the days when I
administered it during its productive life that it required .5 day of
maintenance per six weeks, by a qualified service engineer: tuning power
supplies, adjusting the disk head with the help of a special "alignment"
disk cartridge, checking the fans (25+ in just those two racks), etc. etc.
The CPU consists of 17 large PCBs. The combined MTBF of these PCBs was
1.5 years approx. Then the service engineer came with his box with
exchange boards and swapped until the machine was up&running again.
Without a maintenance contract such a board had a 5-figure exchange fee.....
Hendrik-Jan Thomassen
Hello Milo,
On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 13:38:54 -0400
Milo Velimirović <milovelimirovic(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> What’s your budget and what’s your level of hardware technical skill? If budget is no concern, there are occasional complete pdp11 or vaxen on eBay. Or, you could get CPU cards and interfaces to piece together a system. If you go that route a Unibone or Qbone is highly recommended for both debugging and filling in hardwar gaps via emulation. Alternatively, there are several FPGA projects to emulate -11s.
Buying a complete PDP-11 or VAX is the dream, but it's not what I'm
aiming for to start. I was thinking of something like a UNIX
workstation. I haven't thought about the possibility of piecing together
a system using various cards. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll have to
look into it.
Budget is a concern for me. So ideally I would like to spend around $500
USD on the actual computer. Is that realistic for the type of computer I
mentioned above?
I'm not hardware savvy, so I would have a limited ability to do repairs
on the electronics. I do know someone who is though, so I might be able
to get some help on this project.
I wish you an excellent week,
Vicente
vicente(a)collares.ca
> From: Vicente Collares
> I'm more interested in its historical signaficance.
If that's your interest, PDP-11's are absolutely _the_ way to go. The PDP-11
is _the_ machine that made UNIX. That choice has good points, and a very bad
point, though.
Good points are that QBUS PDP-11's are pretty easy to find, pretty small
(desktop PC-sized), and not very expensive. They're pretty robust, too - I
have a large stack of PDP-11 QBUS CPUs, and none of them had failed, as of the
last time that I powered them on.
The very bad point is that working mass storage for them is very hard to
find. The controllers are around, but not the drives.
Does anyone know if anyone is making a QBUS mass storage clone? Bridgham and
I were going to produce QBUS RK11/RP11 clone that used SD cards to hold the
bits. We got the prototype working, and it booted UNIX, but then I came down
with COVID and post-COVID myalgic encephalomyelitis, and that was the end of
that.
Noel
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 15:16:08 -0400, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com <mailto:henry.r.bent@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 at 14:59, Lawrence Stewart <stewart(a)serissa.com <mailto:stewart@serissa.com>> wrote:
>
>> My rare items are only Unix-adjacent. ... I have some boards for a Digital
>> Firefly, a research vax multiprocessor that ran a Modula-2 based OS that
>> would run Ultrix binaries.
>
> That's incredibly cool. Do you know if any of the Firefly machines
> survived? I saw a VAXstation 3540 for sale at some point recently but it
> was well out of my price range; I hope it found a good home.
>
> -Henry
I have a set of Firefly boards (I worked on the Taos operating system for the Firefly). But as far as I can tell, no software survives.
Charles P. Thacker and Lawrence C. Stewart. 1987. Firefly: a multiprocessor workstation. In Proceedings of the second international conference on Architectual support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS II). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 164–172. https://doi.org/10.1145/36206.36199
Paul McJones and Garret Swart. Evolving the UNIX system interface to support multithreaded programs. Proceedings of the Winter 1989 USENIX Conference, December 1989. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/evolving.pdf Also available as Part I of SRC Research Report 21 (https://mcjones.org/paul/SRC-RR-21.pdf) Part II of which is the Taos Programmer's Manual.
Paul McJones and Andy Hisgen. The Topaz system: Distributed multiprocessor personal computing. Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems. IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems, November 1987. http://www.mcjones.org/paul/wwospos.pdf
(Topaz was the name for the Modula-2+ programming environment, which also ran on VAX Ultrix.)
Paul
I have a number of old Unix artifacts that I value. If I
had to pick one (or one set) top one, it would be the
complete set of Research Unix manuals, 1/e through 10/e.
Other contenders include the AT&T-branded copy of the Lions
commentary (with deathstar on the cover), a signed copy of
The Unix Programming Environment, several unix-branded
plastic containers (not to do with the OS, but bought
from a Korean supermarket a few blocks from where I've
lived for 30 years), and a plastic-slide Spin Out puzzle
from Binary Arts (later ThinkFun but not part of IBM),
an educational puzzle/game company founded in the 1980s
by Bill Ritchie (Dennis's brother) and his wife Andrea
Barthello. (I remember a prototype Spin Out, hand-made
of wood, spending some time in the Unix Room.)
But far more than any of that, I prize the memories and
friendships I've had with fellow Unix people over the
decades, particularly (but not exclusively) from my
six years as sysadmin-hack in 1127.
I'm very disappointed that I won't be at the last-ever
USENIX Technical Conference in Boston in a few weeks.
A show-and-tell there of prized artifacts sounds like
a great idea. I hope those who do make it bring plenty
of artifacts and memories to share.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
A complete set of manuals,v1-v10.
The 8-volume History of Engineering and Science in the Bell
System--not really a Unix artifact but an impressive memento of the
Bell Labs experience. Unix rates several pages in it.
A mock license plate, generously given to me by Jon Hall.
A polyomino puzzle that I solved with the help of Gerard Halzmann's
Spin model-checker. The opportunity for such an "abuse of tools"
illuminates Unix and CSRC as a productive meeting place for disparate
disciplines, occupations, and pastimes.
Doug
