Thread: PDP11/20 demo
View Single Post
Old 7th Aug 2022, 6:31 pm   #6
G6Tanuki
Dekatron
 
G6Tanuki's Avatar
 
Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Wiltshire, UK.
Posts: 13,953
Default Re: PDP11/20 demo

Fascinating history here; in my early-80s IT stuff I had clients with the likes of PDP11/70, but rather more involvement with 'instrumentation' computers - we had a bunch of DEC MINC-11 [Modular INstrumentation Computer] systems - which were basically a PDP11/03 or the LSI-11 version, fitted into a sort of superranuated-oscilloscope-trolley. Twin floppy-drives, or - if you got lucky - a hard-drive. They ran RT-11 or [luxury!!] RSX11-M. Compiling a FORTRAN program involved lots of floppy-swaps.


We also had a few hundred LSI11/23 based controllers for CAMAC crates; these were really fun bits of simply-programmable gear which could be used for anything from controlling a nuclear-reactor to running a HASP workstation to log-in to an IBM/Amdahl/Honeywell mainframe and receive the output of your overnight batch-job.

CATHY and CATEX were the programming-labguages for these; I worked with Dave Hughes who was the designer of CATEX. [CATEX stood for CATHy-Extended].

"DL Protocol" - as invented by Daresbury Labs - was the big thing back then - I was DL.465.0

Thinking about Systime, there was also a 1980s company called "Fungus" who were big in the DEC market; I bought a bunch of controllers from them that let me hook up a string of Control-Data 300MB hard-drives to an 11/70.

More information on the MINC-11 here: https://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/minc/index.html
__________________
I'm the Operator of my Pocket Calculator. -Kraftwerk.

Last edited by G6Tanuki; 7th Aug 2022 at 6:48 pm.
G6Tanuki is offline