On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 9:41 PM, Jerome H. Fine <jhfined...@compsys.to> wrote: >>william degnan wrote: >> Prior to the DEC Rainbow, Chrislin Industries was marketing the 11/23 with >> vt103 as a desktop computer. This is a 3rd party vendor. Maybe they >> were on to something... >> > Back around 1988, one of my customers had a few VT103 > systems with just an RX02 for storage. A 3rd party > controller for an MFM drive (ST506 or DEC RD51) was > added since the DEC RQDX1 took too much power. There > was still sufficient power and room to place the > ST506 drive inside at the base of the VT103.
Sounds like a sweet little system... in 1987, I was using an 11/23 in a BA11N (5.25"-tall rack-mount box) with RX02 and RLV11+RL01, so packing all that, including the 5MB disk into a VT103 would have been quite nice. > Prior to that point, I had a VT103 with just 256 KB > of memory and a DSD 880/8 which had an 8 GB hard > drive / RX03 floppy drive in an external box. So > there were other 3rd party solutions as well. 8MB? But otherwise, also nice. > At one point, just to say that I had done so, I placed > a quad PDP-11/73 CPU along with 4 MB of memory, an ESDI > controller and a DHV11 with 8 serial ports into the > backplane of a VT103. Now you're talking! > I had to power the three 600 MG > hard drives from an additional PC power supply since > there was insufficient power from the VT103. Sure. > But that > demonstrated that just a 4 x 4 Qbus backplane was > sufficient to run an extremely powerful PDP-11 system > using the VT103 as a base system with its own console > terminal. Yep. The biggest limitation was power, the second was limited number of slots, so you needed small but powerful cards to make it worthwhile. > At one point, I heard that someone even > managed to make the first two slots ABCD which allowed > a MicroVAX II to be used instead Wow. That sounds like a fun but much bigger hack. I have a VT103 (w/TU58)... I did set up a simple 11/23 in it once, but I should see what I can do with a SCSI card... -ethan
