[TUHS] 11/60 (was: Unix with TCP/IP for small PDP-11s)

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2017-05-21 23:27, Clem Cole <clemc at 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 at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol