21 May
2017
21 May
'17
10:42 p.m.
On 2017-05-21 23:27, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Actually, the 11/60's main claim to fame was it
supposed to be a
'commercial' PDP-11 and was built for the small business market. The WCS
was a side effect.
As you mentioned in another mail, it's main claim to fame was probably
the short time it actually existed in the market. DEC seriously did some
things wrong on it, such as only 18-bit address, and no split I/D space,
at a time when pretty much any other PDP-11 was going there.
But it was also one of a couple of -11 models where you had the ability
to write your own microcode. But I've never heard of anyone who had the
WCS option. (But at one point, I was playing with four 11/60 machines in
a computer club.)
I don't remember if it was you or someone else who said that there were
several microcode bugs in the 11/60. It ran the DEC OSes, but there were
some issues with Unix. I seem to also remember seeing some special code
in the RSX kernel for some 11/60 oddity, but I would have to search
through the code to remember exactly what that was about.
It was to built to run RSTS and RSX and had a
commercial instruction set
exten *etc.*. Somebody had written a 'dentist office' package for it and a
'car dealership package' IIRC. And was physically packaged a tad
differently than the other 11's as it was trying to be marketing to places
that might want to show it off instead of hiding it in a computer room.
Uh? I have not seen any plans ever mentioning CIS for the 11/60, but I
guess it's possible it was considered at some point. But I can assure
you no CIS ever existed for the 11/60.
The only machines that ever had the CIS option was the 11/44 and
11/23,11/24.
But I have no idea how many machines ever actually had the option installed.
One nice detail of the 11/60 is that it had the FPP build in. But there
was also an optional hardware FPP accelerator available.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol