PDP-11 Newbie Alert --- (gotta start somewhere)

[Robert D. Keys]

Greetings to the list, and thanks to Warren for telling me about it.

I am quite interested in the older unices, and especially the potential
for home use on a smallish box of some sort.  (Nostalgia trip, but why
are most of us here?)

Sadly, my only experiences with PDP-11ish things are so long ago as to
be rather faded.  We used one box (two small chassis about 8 inches high
stacked together -- possibly PDP-8 or PDP-11) as some sort of remote job
entry terminal that the grad students would be occasionally allowed to
touch and load their SAS jobs up from (mid 70's) to the mainframe at
Iowa State U.   I remember the two DEC boxes and some sort of glass tty,
and a paper tape reader that was used to boot it in some way, should
the woeful grad student crash it late at night.  That got me rather
interested in computers and for several years after that time when I
came to NCSU, I tried all kinds of ways to fund and coerce some sort
of Heathkit version of that with some sort of early unix out of the
powers that be, but they tended to think it was computing and not
agronomy, so I wound up doing that with z80's and s-100 bus crates that
could be hooked up to the mainframe remotely via CP/M and paper tape or
81K floppies locally.  But, that has always perked my interest in the
old unix beasts.  I still have the old pdp-11 Heathkit manual sets and
builders instructions, should I find one in the bilges somewhere....(:+}}...

Anyway, I was noticing the pdp-11 system 5/6/7 binaries and the freebie
sco licenses on Minnie, and was wondering where to go for info on how
to bring the things up.  I saw one emulator for DOS? --- (neat way maybe
to use an old 4 meg dos box?).  Can these things be made to run via
a 386/486 bootstrap and emulator, on something like a minix/aix/FreeBSD
sort of machine?  I would expect something like a maintenance boot disk,
and a minimal file system to get the machine up and into the emulator
proper, might be feasible, maybe?

Also, I see pdp-11ish things in surplus around here quite often.
What would be needed to cobble together a system, for a minimal system 7
sort of box to play with?  If there were a list of required boards and
chassis for various levels of system, that might help a newbie get some
sort of machine together.

Thanks, and any comments for the newbie are appreciated.

Bob Keys
rdkeys at seedlab1.cropsci.ncsu.edu




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