anyone still using pdp?
Bill Gunshannon
jgar the jorrible <joel-...@home.com> writes:
> Is anyone still using PDP's (real or emulated) in corporate IT
> environments? If not, when was the last time anyone did?
>
> Just curious. Last saw it more than years ago, personally.
>
Considering that Mentec is still in business and it's a safe bet
hobbyists aren't buying licenses, well..... And then there are
the makers of the Osprey card. Of course, I doubt any of them
hang out here.
bill
--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bi...@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
Rob Brown
> Is anyone still using PDP's (real or emulated) in corporate IT
> environments? If not, when was the last time anyone did?
I was on site with my last PDP-11 customer this morning.
--
Rob Brown b r o w n a t g m c l d o t c o m
G. Michaels Consulting Ltd. (780)438-9343 (voice)
Edmonton (780)437-3367 (FAX)
http://gmcl.com/
John Wilson
>Considering that Mentec is still in business and it's a safe bet
>hobbyists aren't buying licenses, well..... And then there are
>the makers of the Osprey card. Of course, I doubt any of them
>hang out here.
D Bit is alive and well too. It's true there seems to be a lot less PDP-11
activity than there was a few years ago (I think Y2K weeded out a lot of
PDP-11 sites that preferred switching architectures over fixing what they
had) but it's not over by a long shot, the PDP-11 architecture still has all
the benefits it always did and the disadvantages have shrunk a lot -- no one's
depending on RP06es any more, and under emulation the CPU speed is nice.
There will be a new release of Ersatz-11 within the next month or so.
Mostly maintenance fixes and minor stuff but there's a new write cache for
tapes (which is harder than I expected), to deal with the fact that modern
SCSI tapes do their own caching and make some operations seem fast and others
(write tape mark) seem slow, and it's all out of whack with what's fast and
slow on uncached 9-track drives so there have been problems with timeouts
in some of the DEC drivers.
I'm not sure this one will be finished in time for this release, but I'm also
working on extending the protected mode supervisor in the DOS/standalone
builds to support "PAE" 52-bit addressing (on host CPUs that have it)
and the three-level page tables, so that RAMdisks/RAMtapes/caches won't be
limited to under 4 GB. Memory has gotten ridiculously cheap (I just added
4 GB of PC2100 RAM onto a test PC for under $200 off of eBay, it's crazy!),
might as well find a use for it.
John Wilson
D Bit
Stuart Brook
> On Thu, 24 May 2007, jgar the jorrible wrote:
>
> > Is anyone still using PDP's (real or emulated) in corporate IT
> > environments? If not, when was the last time anyone did?
>
> I was on site with my last PDP-11 customer this morning.
Of my own direct customers, I've got a pair of PDPs running in
a pair of Steel plants, and one in a flight simulator. I've got
indirect customers running them in a steel plant, a nickel
smelter, a host of them in a power generation company and a
host of them in air traffic control facilities.
There are definitely lots of them still around!
I just sold a pair of /93s due to mate with another and going
to Holland.
They're definitely a fair number still out and about.
Kelvin Smith
images that don't necessarily apply to our company, but we're a corporation.
We're slowly working on redevelopment of our software for Windows, but
there's a huge amount of code to replace. I know of at least one financial
services company that still operates genuine PDP-11 hardware to run some of
their mission-critical systems; I think they're operating under the "if it
ain't broke, don't fix it" principle.
Our PC running the emulator died on us earlier this week. In about two hours
I had us up and running on a new PC with all the bells & whistles (SCSI tape
drive, mux, etc.) attached. It wouldn't have been quite so simple with a
genuine PDP (not to mention that the PC/emulator combo is approximately 20x
as fast).
--
Kelvin Smith
remove "1111" from address for email
"John Wilson" <wil...@dbit.com> wrote in message
news:200705241939....@dbit.dbit.com...
Lee Havemann, Operations Manager
> On Thu, 24 May 2007, jgar the jorrible wrote:
>
>
>> Is anyone still using PDP's (real or emulated) in corporate IT
>> environments? If not, when was the last time anyone did?
>>
>
> I was on site with my last PDP-11 customer this morning.
>
>
>
entry (RSTS/E 10.1).
If I could ever take the time to see why John's erzatz 11 won't
recognise the NIC using DECNet,
I would switch over in a heartbeat, lol
roh...@empire.net
yet. Throughput issues were killing us, so we moved the rest of the
users to E11.
Our customers are a motley crew, but a few are fast-growing concerns
that rely totally on our rt11/tsx-based software. They like the fact
that every app they've had developed over the last couple decades
still works.
Our flagship account currently has around 60 users - about 10% are
portable bar code guns - on two hosts sharing a database on a half-
dozen 15k u160 scsi drives. The hosts are Athlon 2600s as the kt600
chip set is very kind to e11.
All disk i/o is unbuffered - everything's a 'hardware' access (except
that each drive has a cache twice as big as each pdp11's main
memory!). You wouldn't believe the speed: a dir/bad on an 'rqdx3'
takes a second or two.
My development/test system currently is a four-host setup sporting
over a hundred user lines.
Our systems bill out hundreds of orders via email and fax every night
from unlit rooms, so our customers just can't see the point of
converting to Windows. Thank god.
Johnny Billquist
> Is anyone still using PDP's (real or emulated) in corporate IT
> environments? If not, when was the last time anyone did?
>
> Just curious. Last saw it more than years ago, personally.
word processing on them, but I have customers running them in test and
control systems. Both real hardware and emulated. At several sites.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
jgar the jorrible
> jgar the jorrible skrev:> Is anyone still using PDP's (real or emulated) in corporate IT
> > environments? If not, when was the last time anyone did?
>
> > Just curious. Last saw it more than years ago, personally.
>
> What do you mean "corporate IT environments"? I don't know anyone doing
> word processing on them, but I have customers running them in test and
> control systems. Both real hardware and emulated. At several sites.
>
Well of course, that is a somewhat ambiguous term, I was just trying
to rule out stuff like hardware control systems in favor of
applications that have people doing stuff with data. But the answer
about lights-out faxing certainly would be included. I didn't expect
anyone to say mission-critical systems, that was eye-opening. As a
fan of RSTS going back to 1980, I'm happy to hear it. I have a 23
hardware modified to 23+ and a 73, but I haven't powered them in more
than a decade, need to finish the basement first.
jg
--
@home.com is bogus. "We used to spend all night getting drunk and
rebuilding pointer files. Now we spend all night reconstructing
referential integrity. Can't get drunk. That's progress?" - Me,
2003
Johnny Billquist
> On May 25, 12:03 am, Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se> wrote:
>> jgar the jorrible skrev:> Is anyone still using PDP's (real or emulated) in corporate IT
>>> environments? If not, when was the last time anyone did?
>>> Just curious. Last saw it more than years ago, personally.
>> What do you mean "corporate IT environments"? I don't know anyone doing
>> word processing on them, but I have customers running them in test and
>> control systems. Both real hardware and emulated. At several sites.
>
> Well of course, that is a somewhat ambiguous term, I was just trying
> to rule out stuff like hardware control systems in favor of
> applications that have people doing stuff with data. But the answer
> about lights-out faxing certainly would be included. I didn't expect
> anyone to say mission-critical systems, that was eye-opening. As a
> fan of RSTS going back to 1980, I'm happy to hear it. I have a 23
> hardware modified to 23+ and a 73, but I haven't powered them in more
> than a decade, need to finish the basement first.
they have screens with data that they check, and fill in (a'la FMS, but
a different product). This is with RSX, and it's both steel mill
operators and radio control for taxi and bus traffic, as well as saw
mills and also more embedded control systems for engine manufacturers
testing platforms and also some military applications.
I know of one 11/23 which is very mission critical at a steel mill. It
happened to break down a couple of years ago, and suddenly 120 people
were standing around with nothing to do, and the melting oven took about
a day to cool down so that the wasted raw material could be removed. And
of course, then the 11/23 had to be fixed.
As usual with these systems, it was the hard disk that broke. One RD54
in this case. That has now been replaced by a SCSI disk.
A lot of the stuff still around on PDP-11 systems are rather mission
critical, I'd guess. If it weren't, chances are that it has been
replaced by now.
Funny story: I talked with people responsible for the development of the
system used in saw mills a number of years ago (around 1999, when they
were worried about Y2K). The systems process the waste from sawing up
lumber by doing a real time analysis of video information. They had
looked at replacing the PDP-11 systems, but at that time no software
solution could manage the data at enough speed (with modern hardware).
There is always something about dedicated hardware... :-) And that
hardware sat on the Q-bus, along with software to take advantage of it.
And of course, RSX didn't really have a Y2K problem, which I told them,
so they kept on running the systems happily.