RSX-11D and RSX-20F
Rich Alderson
derivative not of RSX-11M, but rather of the (unrelated???) RSX-11D. (The FE
is an 11/40.)
Can anyone either of these newsgroups verify this claim about 20F?
What is the likelihood of finding a copy of 11D in someone's attic collection,
for use in SIMH or another emulator?
--
Rich Alderson | /"\ ASCII ribbon |
ne...@alderson.users.panix.com | \ / campaign against |
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Al Kossow
> I've been given to understand that the front-end software on the DEC-20 is a
> derivative not of RSX-11M, but rather of the (unrelated???) RSX-11D. (The FE
> is an 11/40.)
11/M is a subset of 11/D developed at Monsanto
the evolution was roughly
11/D -+- 11/M - 11/M PLUS
+- 11/S
One of the things I had wanted to do was dig into RSX-20 a bit to see
what if any of the 11/D features were actually used by the front end
software.
Alan Frisbie
> From article <mddd6et...@panix5.panix.com>, by Rich Alderson <ne...@alderson.users.panix.com>:
>
>>I've been given to understand that the front-end software on the DEC-20 is a
>>derivative not of RSX-11M, but rather of the (unrelated???) RSX-11D. (The FE
>>is an 11/40.)
>
>
> 11/M is a subset of 11/D developed at Monsanto
> the evolution was roughly
>
> 11/D -+- 11/M - 11/M PLUS
> +- 11/S
RSX-11M is a subset of RSX-11D only in the sense that it
was originally designed to run on smaller (non-memory-mapped)
PDP-11 systems. The internal design is *totally* different.
Only the system interfaces (now known as the API) were the same,
and even then there are some diffences.
I would call the design of RSX-11D much more "conservative".
RSX-11M was much leaner, but lacked some of the checking
mechanisms in RSX-11D.
Alan
hea...@noaracnetspam.com
> What is the likelihood of finding a copy of 11D in someone's attic collection,
> for use in SIMH or another emulator?
Pretty slim. Unfortunatly, I'm not aware of anyone having copies of RSX-11D,
RSX-11S, or IAS. That doesn't mean they aren't out there, but the likely
hood of getting your hands on a copy is pretty slim.
Zane
Alan Frisbie
If you ask the right packrat, the odds are pretty good. I can't guarantee
that the tapes are still readable, but I'm pretty sure that I have RSX-11D v6.2
and IAS v3.0. However, they are buried in boxes at the back of a *large*
storage unit. One of my (many!) projects is to spool all those old tapes into
TPC files before the bits all rot away.
I think I even have some (but probably not all) of the manuals.
Alan
Rob Brown
> 11/M is a subset of 11/D developed at Monsanto
^^^^^^^^
Really? I thought popular folklore said Cutler, an employee of
Digital at the time, did it over a weekend.
--
Rob Brown br...@gmcl.com
G. Michaels Consulting Ltd. (866)438-2101 (voice) toll free!
Edmonton (780)438-9343 (voice)
(780)437-3367 (FAX)
http://gmcl.com/
Paul Repacholi
> Pretty slim. Unfortunatly, I'm not aware of anyone having copies of
> RSX-11D, RSX-11S, or IAS. That doesn't mean they aren't out there,
> but the likely hood of getting your hands on a copy is pretty slim.
11S is just a small set of extra files to add to a standard 11M kit.
Got a couple somewhere, prob over in the museums piles somewhere...
11D/IAS did not go to Mentec as it was used by SAC.
Now there is a REAL `blue screen of death' opening for M$...
Also, that unsung orphan, TRAX. Be nice to get a full set of sources
in hand.
--
Paul Repacholi 1 Crescent Rd.,
+61 (08) 9257-1001 Kalamunda.
West Australia 6076
comp.os.vms,- The Older, Grumpier Slashdot
Raw, Cooked or Well-done, it's all half baked.
EPIC, The Architecture of the future, always has been, always will be.
Alan Frisbie
> hea...@NOaracnetSPAM.com writes:
> Also, that unsung orphan, TRAX. Be nice to get a full set of sources
> in hand.
I would also love to get a distribution kit for TRAX to go with
my complete TRAX v1.0 doc set.
Alan
paramucho
wrote:
So you're the single reported customer for TRAX?
--
Ian
Impressive If Haughty - Q Magazine
Sergio Pedraja
> If you ask the right packrat, the odds are pretty good. I can't guarantee
> that the tapes are still readable, but I'm pretty sure that I have RSX-11D
> v6.2 and IAS v3.0.
I should like to see one emulator (or one of my PDP's)
running IAS in a future :-) I hope you can locate some time
to dump this OS's to virtual tape images.
Cheers
Sergio
Rob Brown
> On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Al Kossow wrote:
>
> > 11/M is a subset of 11/D developed at Monsanto
> ^^^^^^^^
>
> Really? I thought popular folklore said Cutler, an employee of
> Digital at the time, did it over a weekend.
To clarify my question/confusion: I thought it was developed at
Digital by Dave Cutler. Does anybody know?
Al Kossow
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Rob Brown wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Al Kossow wrote:
>>
>> > 11/M is a subset of 11/D developed at Monsanto
>> ^^^^^^^^
>>
>> Really? I thought popular folklore said Cutler, an employee of
>> Digital at the time, did it over a weekend.
>
> To clarify my question/confusion: I thought it was developed at
> Digital by Dave Cutler. Does anybody know?
>
--
I'm still digging to find where "D" refers to Dupont and "M" to
Monsanto. Ralph Stamerjohn would certainly know, if he's lurking.
--
From: Lars Poulsen <la...@cmc.com>
Subject: RSX-11D
Date: 1999/11/30
james.arnold@!!!usa.net wrote:
> IAS was the timesharing system based on RSX11D. All the later
> flavours of RSX, 11S, 11M, 11M-PLUS were all decendants of 11D. Even
> VMS traces its roots to 11D. This is very evident in some of the system
> APIs.
RSX-11A, B and C were memory-resident little multitasking kernels,
generally hosted on DOS/BATCH-11.
RSX-11D was a whole operating system. Multitasking, multi-user.
I think it required I/D separation. RSX-11D device drivers were
full-fledged tasks; this meant that the code to service a read-
or write-operation on your fancy custom device could suddenly
decide to go write trace record to a file on disk. Very handy
for debugging.
RSX-11D tracked resources on behalf of its tasks. If a kernel
buffer was allocated to hold parameters for an inter-task message,
it was charged to the calling task, and when the system routines
sent the message to the other task, the charge was credited back
and charged to the recipient. When the work item was finally
complete, and the kernel buffer released, the charge was canceled.
Task were only allowed to exeit when they had released all their
resources. This was an admirable idea, but made debugging of
system tasks pure hell: If the task crashed with system data
resources slightly messed up, the system could not safely
release the buffers and credit the right task, so half-debugged
device drivers that crashed would tend to get locked in memory,
so you had to reboot for the next test cycle.
RSX-11D soon grew too large to fit on a 32KB (16KW) machine.
David Cutler decided that it was possible to implement the same
services with much less code, starting from scratch, and went on
to do just that. In 18 months, he basically wrote and debugged
the RSX-11M kernel. The system was released in source form, and
with conditional assembly could be configured at compile time
for any hardware from 8KW 11/05 to a full-house 11/45.
Over the years I worked on RSX-11M based system integration,
I eventually got to take a look at most of the modules of 11M,
and Dave Cutler's name was in the header of each one!
Al Kossow
<Pine.LNX.4.44.030827...@localhost.localdomain>, Rob
Brown <br...@gmcl.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, Rob Brown wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 25 Aug 2003, Al Kossow wrote:
> >
> > > 11/M is a subset of 11/D developed at Monsanto
> > ^^^^^^^^
> >
> > Really? I thought popular folklore said Cutler, an employee of
> > Digital at the time, did it over a weekend.
>
> To clarify my question/confusion: I thought it was developed at
> Digital by Dave Cutler. Does anybody know?
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/Windows-NT_is_VMS_re-implemented.html
An excerpt from "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer
Copyright (c) 1993 by Microsoft Press
(In 2003 this book is out of print but is still available from used Book
sellers)
FOREWORD (By David N. Cutler)
In 1965, I graduated from college with a B.A. in mathematics, a minor in
physics, and an overwhelming desire to be an engineer and to build things.
So I took a job with DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, as a materials
testing engineer. After about a year of absolute boredom, I was lent to
the mathematics and statistics group assigned to construct a computer
simulation model for a new foam-making process that the Scott Paper
Company was developing. Working with machines that never did what I meant
them to was humiliating, but within six months I was hooked, and what I
had shunned coming out of school -- computers -- turned into my life's
vocation.
Soon after, I transferred to DuPont's engineering department, where I
could program full time. DuPont had a small group that built online
computer system applications. My real motivation for joining this group
was to get closer to computers, and in fact, I wanted to work on
implementing an operating system. While in the group, I had the good
fortune to work on several stand-alone real-time systems where the project
involved writing the central control program that scheduled the various
tasks and monitored system activity as well as writing the actual
application code.
It soon became apparent that the only way I was going to get the
opportunity to work on implementing a real operating system was to join a
company that made computers for a business. And so in 1971 I left DuPont
for a job in Maynard, Massachusetts, with Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC). As it turned out, this put me in the operating system business for
quite some time to come. Little did I know that I would be fortunate
enough to develop several operating systems in my lifetime; developing one
is a rare opportunity for anyone.
My first operating system project was to build a real-time system called
RSX-11M that ran on Digital's PDP-11 16-bit series of minicomputers. At
the time, our goals seemed very ambitious. We were asked to build a
multitasking operating system that would run in 32 KB of memory with a
hierarchical file system, application swapping, real-time scheduling, and
a set of development utilities. The operating system and utilities were to
run on the entire line of PDP-11 platforms, from the very small systems up
through the PDP-11/70 which had memory-mapping hardware and supported up
to 4 MB of memory.
I have many fond memories of how RSX-11M took shape, I had a rubber stamp
made that proclaimed "Size Is the Goal" and proceeded to stamp every last
bit of correspondence to make sure that all the programmers and project
managers understood how important it was to achieve our goals. We also
learned the power of conditional assembly (high level language use in
operating systems was in its infancy at this time), and whenever someone
added a feature, we just made it a system-generation option.
While developing RSX-11M, we spent most of our time engineering solutions
to memory problems. Because the system had to run in 32 KB, we generated a
memory budget that divided available memory equally between the between
the operating system and the utility programs. That left a mere 16 KB for
utility programs and led to long hours tuning overlay structures to
achieve acceptable performance for many of the RSX-11M system programs.
Although RSX-11M had some very stringent size and performance constraints,
of the systems I've worked on it was probably the easiest one to develop.
It involved re-implementing an existing system but allowed us the freedom
to change and subset the programming interfaces as long as programs could
be reassembled or recompiled with minimal source-code changes. RSX-11M was
introduced in 1973, 18 months after we started building it. It proved to
be very successful and helped make the PDP-11 the most popular 16-bit
minicomputer of its time.
Paul Repacholi
> On Tue, 26 Aug 2003 12:50:33 -0700, Alan Frisbie <Ab...@NelsonUSA.com>
> wrote:
>
>>Paul Repacholi wrote:
>>> hea...@NOaracnetSPAM.com writes:
>>
>>> Also, that unsung orphan, TRAX. Be nice to get a full set of sources
>>> in hand.
>>
>>I would also love to get a distribution kit for TRAX to go with
>>my complete TRAX v1.0 doc set.
>
> So you're the single reported customer for TRAX?
There was also a TRAX system in Tasmania. So that is 2, if you consider
Tassie to be on planet Earth :)
Peter da Silva
the file system was? One level of directories named by user/group ID
doesn't qualify as hierarchical in my mind:
> At the time, our goals seemed very ambitious. We were asked to build a
> multitasking operating system that would run in 32 KB of memory with a
> hierarchical file system, application swapping, real-time scheduling, and
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> a set of development utilities. The operating system and utilities were to
> run on the entire line of PDP-11 platforms, from the very small systems up
> through the PDP-11/70 which had memory-mapping hardware and supported up
> to 4 MB of memory.
--
I've seen things you people can't imagine. Chimneysweeps on fire over the roofs
of London. I've watched kite-strings glitter in the sun at Hyde Park Gate. All
these things will be lost in time, like chalk-paintings in the rain. `-_-'
Time for your nap. | Peter da Silva | Har du kramat din varg, idag? 'U`
jmfb...@aol.com
pe...@abbnm.com (Peter da Silva) wrote:
>Did RSX-11 miss the design goal, or is Cutler misremembering how flat
>the file system was?
<snip>
If the blurb quoted him accurately and there were no typoes, he
misremembered some.
/BAH
Subtract a hundred and four for e-mail.
Paul Repacholi
> Did RSX-11 miss the design goal, or is Cutler misremembering how
> flat the file system was? One level of directories named by
> user/group ID doesn't qualify as hierarchical in my mind:
Several things in that seem `iffy', though not totally wrong.
There was SCS that did have hirachical directories, but it did not
ship, then POS ate it with named directories.
Hey, it is at least as hierachical as windows is working.
h2o...@gmail.com
Johnny Billquist
11M is a reimplementation of 11D done in a different way with focus on a
much lower memory footprint, and more efficient resource usage.
M+ was then an expansion of 11M. Monsanto did not have anything to do
with it. It was all done at DEC, by Dave Cutler (I'm sure others were
involved, but all the main components bear his name in the sources). You
can all check the sources yourself. 11M was written 1973-1974.
RSX-20F is pretty much an unmapped 11M system, but with drivers and
programs required for acting as a front end in a DEC-20.
I don't think 11D could even run on a PDP-11 with no MMU.
(And sorry if the attributions come out wrong here, I'm not sure who
wrote what.)
Johnny
Rich Alderson
a decade ago.
>> From article <mddd6et...@panix5.panix.com>, by Rich Alderson
>> <ne...@alderson.users.panix.com>:
>>> I've been given to understand that the front-end software on the DEC-20 is
>>> a derivative not of RSX-11M, but rather of the (unrelated???) RSX-11D.
>>> (The FE is an 11/40.)
>> 11/M is a subset of 11/D developed at Monsanto
>> the evolution was roughly
>> 11/D -+- 11/M - 11/M PLUS
>> +- 11/S
>> One of the things I had wanted to do was dig into RSX-20 a bit to see
>> what if any of the 11/D features were actually used by the front end
>> software.
following is the new content:
>> Yes RSX-20 is from 11/D (RON McLean)
post (which was based on reading the RSX-20F documentation, right on page 2),
I've had occasion to read the source of both RSX-20F and RSX-11M, and can say
without fear of contradiction that -20F was almost if not entirely based on
-11M.
--
Rich Alderson ne...@alderson.users.panix.com
the russet leaves of an autumn oak/inspire once again the failed poet/
to take up his pen/and essay to place his meagre words upon the page...
Johnny Billquist
Sorry, Rich...
Who is this person/system that right now seem to post/respond to super
old posts. I see it in several newsgroups...?
Johnny
glen herrmannsfeldt
(snip)
> And I fell into the trap of not even looking at the date of things.
> Sorry, Rich...
> Who is this person/system that right now seem to post/respond to super
> old posts. I see it in several newsgroups...?
and started showing old posts. Others might also do that.
-- glen
Rich Alderson
> On 2014-02-03 15:24, Rich Alderson wrote:
>> h2o...@gmail.com writes:
>>> On Monday, August 25, 2003 12:30:31 PM UTC-6, Al Kossow wrote:
>> You will please note that the article to which you responded is from more
>> than a decade ago.
> Sorry, Rich...
> Who is this person/system that right now seem to post/respond to super
> old posts. I see it in several newsgroups...?
than it used to the nature of Usenet posts, including things like dates!