On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Brendan McNeill <bren...@mcneill.co.nz> wrote: > Greetings > > I have a restored and (I think) functional PDT-150 with dual 8” floppy drives > but no software. I do have some blank 8” diskettes but no real means of > transferring an operating system or (say) a word processing program onto them.
This reminds me to ask, since I also have a PDT-150... there's vtserver for larger machines (ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/pub/PDP-11/Vtserver/vtreadme.html - 192K of RAM required) that can be used to image 8" floppies on a bare machine. Every few years, I keep tossing around the idea to bang out a less-feature-rich vtserver client with only one device driver loaded and target a machine with 56Kbytes (or 60Kbytes - PDT-150) but I've never sat down to check the level of effort, or if it's just worth starting from scratch with an RX (or RL or RK) target and make a new app and client. The advantage of reusing the vtserver server part is that it's been in use for long enough to find the obvious bugs, and the limitation of 16-bit block counts (32MB) isn't an issue for most 1970s media, even up to RK07s. Once you have a working RT-11 system, things like Kermit are handy enough for moving files, but I think we are still lacking in the "bootstrapping a small machine" department. For me, since I have alternatives, the "simpler" option is to turn a MicroPDP-11 (w/256Kbytes or more) into an RX01/RX02/RL01/RL02 imaging machine and just use vtserver. I still dream of a bare-metal solution for 64KB machines, since that _is_ viable for a small RT-11 rig. -ethan
