I remember RK05 drives with hundreds of files in a flat file system. PIP was a must have. I remember the first time logging on to a Vax 11/750 running Berkeley 4.something UNIX in the early 1980s and being amazed at how much easier life was with a hierarchical file system. I recall when MS-DOS 2.x was released in 1983. I believe the first version we had on our hardware was 2.05. MS-DOS got hierarchical file system and could support what seemed like a giant capacity 10 megabyte hard drive. It felt a little like being on big iron but running on a PC.
Back in 1980 when I was using Color Computer someone wrote a PDP11 to Basic. Just a few fixes and I was running PDP11 on a Color Computer I did not know the speed of the PDP11 but it was slow in Basic!
Quick quiz: who recall the DEBUG command to start the MFM low-level format on a PC? I guessed wrong, but was close. Must be getting old! Excellent video, sir! Keep this old hardware stuff coming.
Eventually, in the 386/486 era, you started to see PC BIOSes with a fancy menu-based setup program in ROM. Some of them had a command to low-level format an MFM/RLL hard disk…but by that time, IDE was rapidly becoming a thing, making low-level formatting unnecessary (and impossible).
@@wesley00042 Yup! Did you know it or have to look it up? For me, 60 years old, probably haven't used that command in ~40 years, I misremembered it as "g c800:0"... not bad, but it's a sign the memory is going. I feel HAL forgetting the words to "Daisy" as his memory modules were being yanked out. Cheers!
A PDP-11 video? Oh hell yeah. This is going to be a treat, thanks for posting this. (I love collecting and reading old books about the early days of computing. The PDP and large mainframes are such fascinating machines. )
At least you have the tools to low-level format the drive! When I worked with the Pick os back in the 1980's as a developer and porting Pick to different hardware at the os assembler/driver level, there wasn't a way to format a hard disk. The Pick os treated all drives as one logical unit with a starting frame number of 1 and with the last frame number dependent upon the number/size of the installed disks. It was the job of the low-level disk device driver to convert a frame number from the os into the required disk no/cylinder/sector etc. It assumed that a drive had already been formatted and that bad blocks etc had been mapped out at the drive level. If a disk had to be low-level formatted then this had to be done using another os (we used os-9) - much to the bane of the production staff who built the systems. There wasn't even a high-level os format. As the OS treated all the disks as just one big virtual disk, there was no reason for an individual os level disk format. To install Pick on a computer you just inserted the boot floppy disk/tape and re-booted and Pick would be installed. If you wanted to extend capacity you may or may not just add an extra drive - depending upon the particular Pick implementation you had. The 'smart' versions interleaved the logical frame numbers across all of the installed disks (which improved read/write times)- so to add a new one you had to create a sysgen tape, install the disk and then re-install the os and all the files. Others 'added' the frames for the new disk at the end of the existing frames and detected this during boot and altered frame tables etc to match so there was no need to save/restore the system. And others only detected new disks during a system restore (even if the new one as 'added' at the end) so you had to save/restore the system for the new disk drive to be used.
This video and all of the comments are a blast from the past. I was a Genigraphics FE for a while. We worked on most of the DEC gear going back to 11/34 and 11/23. But, I’ll be honest. I don’t miss it.
During the late 1970s, I worked at a computer center with a PDP-11/70. The hard drives that we had were the size of washing machines, and used removable Nashua multi-platten drive packs.
When I saw the ST drive, my initial reaction was shock, as I was used to seeing the disk drives that you describe. Had no clue that they could actually use Seagate drives.
No wonder the uni sysadmins were considered to be gods in the old days. I first learnt to code in 1985 at Macquarie Uni (Sydney) using Fortran77 on a PDP-11 running VMS. Nice to see the hardware that was behind those VT100 terminals ...
That little Hard Disk looks just like the 20MB units I put in PCs in the 1980s. In DOS we used a debug program to kick off the low level format. Then fdisk to partition, and finally format to make it accessible to DOS.
It is the same. St-225 was my first PC hard drive. $395. I still have it and can see it now on the shelf. Still running when parked. He didn't say up front, but the replacement is apparently the ST-251 which is the 43MB version, same hh form factor.
@@eliotmansfield Yeah my Atari 800XL had an ST251 HD attached to the MIO. Didn't have the big bucks for the 40MB bad boy at the time. I could be wrong but I think the ST251 was 20MB and the 225 was 40MB, but that was a long time ago.
@@msromike123 ST225 was 20MB and ST251 was 40MB. I installed and setup many of these drives back in the day in PCs. Never seen them used in a PDP11 before.
Good video Dave. PIP , and those other commands - I remember PDP administrators using those same commands when I worked for Evans and Sutherland, in Salt Lake City, and I was installing the PS2 picture system on the DEC PDP 11 and VAX systems. A blast from the past!
Seeing PIP used, it suddenly dawned on me that this is probably why PIP works the way it does on CP/M. 🙂 I always assumed that Gary Kildall based the commands on something older, but I never got around to finding out what. Neat!
I remember pip from CP/M - Peripheral Interface Program if I recall correctly. I didn't really have any peripherals on my Globe Microsystems Z80 with 64k RAM and two 5.25" floppy drives so never really used it much! I wish I stll had that machine but alas I sold it in the 90s.
ST-251's always make an interesting hi pitch sound when they seek. I still remember going on a call where the customer couldn't access the HDD. Was an ST-251. I noticed it was on but not spinning (you can see the shaft on the bottom. was slightly visible). It must have gotten dirt or something in the bearing. I spun it up just a bit and it took off spinning. Told him not to turn off his PC until he had gotten all of his data off of it to floppy and order a new drive.
As always your videos are amazingly relaxing to watch. And although I really haven't much of a clue with that type of hardware. Every now and then you say or mention a task or routine you are doing and it just enlighten s the research bug in me to try to figure out what rabbit hole i just fell in. Thanks and take care Mister Dave.
Then you'd really enjoy an Eagle HD spinning up. Sounds like a jet taking off. I no longer have the 4 I had. Donated them to a friend who could make use of them.
This is causing flashbacks to using LSI-11/02 and 11/23 QBUS machines. I remember patching RT-11 drivers to make a Priam 33 MB SMD drive look like three 10 MB RK02 drives. My first integration was on serial number 13. We had a single board Interface card that looked like either a serial or parallel port to the OS, was a parallel interface for a Tektronix 4014 terminal powered by an Intel 8086 used as a display processor for the 3D CADD system running on the DEC system. Ver 1 could display 30K vectors per minute. Ver 2 added an 8087 and 8089 increasing display speed to 320K per minute. These speeds required the parallel interface version of the display. We were told it was the first SBC using the 8086 designed and built in the South.
To my knowledge LBN stands for "logical block number" which is the address of a specific block of data on the storage medium. In disk operations, LBNs are used to identify the location of data for reading or writing, making abstraction of the physical structure of the disk.
I used to work with a pdp 11/45 with core memory ... as in iron ferrite beads with loops of wire going through each one ... 64,000 of them. :) To boot it, you set 16 toggle switches on the main panel, latch it into to the PC (program counter) and put another switch into the run position.
Instead of going the PDP route in the 1970's, my father bought an AlphaMicro AM100 system (WD16 CPU, S-100 bus) using a CDC Hawk hard drive with one fixed 5 MB disk and one removable 5 MB disk. It was the size of a trash compactor. :) Later, he added a 20 MB Winchester drive that would fit in the bottom of the Hawk cabinet.
I'd like to see Lunar running. 🙂 Decades ago, we had a Vax sitting beside our test station, with a ginormous CRT monitor. We filled the test program compile waiting time with Lunar Lander; and (therefore) I was pretty good at it.
I had the foresight to save some of the old junk I used to work with. I have a 5MB drive (8") that weighs about 20 pounds. It came from a kit Altair I think. I was also around when Shugart/Mitac began building 10MB half height 5.25" drives to go in what we used to call "The XP option" which was a 5150 with a 10MB Shugart instead of the Seagate in the logo (5160) chassis. The stories I could tell having worked for a gray marketer of IBM equipment would be astounding. Nobody would believe the crap we used to do, including at one employer, pirating BIOS chips...
Never saw a PDP but we worked on MPI/CDC disks, on the MPI 450s we adjusted the heads manually with an alignment disk pack, adjusting to the dibits with a scope :) (1980'ish)
Ahh the old Seagate ST-225. Fond memories. So many of those were used in the IBM PC-XT clones. They were reliable too. I used to have dozens of them as they were often replaced with larger drives as they came out from the manufacturers. I remember getting my first 1 gigabyte drive. A group of us at work got together and bought around 20 of them for ourselves at $1000 a piece. It was a smoking deal at the time. I felt like I was swimming in disk space at the time.
Those old drives were nearly bulletproof. I remember when they were brand new they would sometimes get errors with use unless you “broke them in” first. I would low-level format them, then run a diagnostic program that did seek tests overnight, as the alignment would shift over time, then reformat the next day and the drives usually would be solid after that.
do you have a video on how to get that 'cool-retro-term' set up? i think its really cool you're using old hardware and new hardware in tandem like this. if i had infinite time and money i would love to do some projects with vintage computers
It is a terminal emulator available in the repositories of most Linux distros. `apt-get install cool-retro-term` And that's about it other than selecting the color scheme and adjusting the effects sliders (right click in the window to get settings). Debian with Xfce puts the CRT icon in the "System" section of the application menu I don't have my other systems running right now to note specific distro differences.
RSX11 - my favourite operating system and the one I used most of the time from 1978 to 1992. I still remember all the manual sysgen stuff we had to do (SAVe and BOOt commands needed) before the invention of autoconfiguration with M-Plus and MicroRSX. Did I spot a B2S file in there, aka a Basic+2 source code file?
I remember paying a small fortune for a new ST-225 back in the mid 80s. It still blows mind that I started my IT career installing 20mb drives and 40 years later I think nothing of installing a petabyte NAS.
Hi Dave, thank you for another informative and interesting video! I'm curious. What systems did you study in college for your operating system class and computer organization class? Did you study PDP-11 or program on PDP-11 in college?
Wow, I had forgotten about pip. Worked with pdp-11s from 1977 until about 2002 with RSX-11M / Plus. Ported pdp-11 software to Vax, modcomp, and eventually Linux.
Yes, the ST506 style drives from that era all used bands and stepper motors. You could hear them chirp when the heads seeked. Some higher end drives used voice coils, but those didn’t become mainstream until the 90s sometime.
Hi Dave, fantastic channel. I've just spotted something in the classic film Wargames. When David dials into his schools computer, did the school really have a PDP 11/270? On the terminal login screen top left it shows this. What does TTY 34/984 mean? Keep up the great work Dave, you have a fascinating channel. Cheers Col, UK.
@Dave - Could you provide some details re the hardware setup for this pdp11 please. What floppy drives/controller are used? What controller is used for the hard disk? Did you build this from parts or did you acquire 'as is' - as this case isn't listed for a PDP11/83 computer as far as I can see? Great video though. More on PDP11s please! They were and remain my favourite mini-computers. Back in the 1970/80s I enjoyed assembler programming (with RT11 and for bare-metal) - and still do!. I've written about four pdp11 assemblers in different languages over the years with my latest in C++. PDP11 is IMO a really nice assembly language and was the first I learnt. I'm currently finalising a multi-user (using DZ11) snake program (see usagi electric pdp11 discord forum) in assembler as a bare-metal program. Unfortunately I don't have an actual PDP11 and have to make do with simh. Doh! Keep up the good work :)
I believe from memory these drives will support the 1st version of windows. I believe theres a few archive sites online with copy's of antique software like captain comic, space invaders, asteroid , front page which is a word processor and so on .
Once I had picked one of those up to move it. Partly because it was heavier than expected, I dropped it on the floor, & the HD didn't survive. But I kept my job 🙂
Cool stuff, Dave! I remember working on dual PDP-11/70 systems for my first real programming. It was RSTS/E and BASIC-PLUS all the way. Do you have anything that can run RSTS/E?
It was only later releases of RSX11M that introduced DCL commands like DIR, TYP, DEL etc. Under the covers it was still the old PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program) command like in earlier releases: PIP /LI, PIP TI:=filename.ext, PIP filename.ext/DE
I just had a flashback of working on pdp11/23 RT11 with 2 floppies and 2 RL02 removable diskpack drives. I was nearly done with a project when my boss came rushing in: "I need to quickly copy this floppy over to this other floppy. Can I jump in real quick?" I said sure. I watched as she typed COPY /DEVICE DU0: DL1: /NOQ That copied her floppy block for block over the top of my RL02. I had some week-old backups and a recent printout so it only took me 2 days to recover. I would love it if you could find an RL01 or RL02 and get that working and show everyone.
I remember going to an expose of the first TI-99 hard drive. it was about 5 x 4. It6 held 5mb and the salesman's pitch was, this holds more memory than you will ever need. I was astonished at his stupidity.
I remember the days when you hit the enter key and heard your HD go "zzz-zzzdt" and then saw the results on screen. The 8088 days..expectations were somewhat lower then...
The UIT question isn't asking for a unit number. It's looking for the number that indicates what type of drive you are formatting. The ST-251 drive is an RD32. When you answered 0, you indicated it was an RD50 - a much smaller drive. You should have answered 6, for RD32. It would have formatted longer, and made the entire disk usable.
Ah, nostalgia. I cut my teeth on PDP8,PDP11,PDP15 and later PDP10 computers. Still remember taking several weeks recovering a hard drive with the data for my PhD after accidentally doing “dir /z” instead of “dir /s” at 2:30am🤦♂️
Old software used to be so verbal. Today you would simply get a "Sorry, something went wrong" error and have to click OK and go back to square one. You know, don't want to confuse the user with all those complicated errors or have to code in actual error handling.
Totally random fun fact. As a technician in the 80's, I sold and installed plenty of ST-225s in PCs. When I started watching the series CSI, amongst the background noise I could swear I heard the unmistakable sound of the ST-225 stepper motor. Can anyone corroborate this? It's in like every episode of CSI Vegas.
Would the os run slower if it's on the physical drive and not on the virtual one and if it was on the real drive would it only affect booting up? and how would you see the term on your mac if it was ?
Yeah older computers were heavy as sin, but it also never had you questioning whether you could effectively use it as a weapon if someone breaks in. Just imagine some dude chucking a 'ME era tower or monitor at you, not a fun thought.
Loving the amber 80 col display, very comforting.
Hercules!
Compaq amber 80 suitcase.
Good ole PIP! PIP was a very powerful tool on the old PDP-1160 and CP/M machines I used many years ago... You brought back a lot of memories!
I remember RK05 drives with hundreds of files in a flat file system. PIP was a must have. I remember the first time logging on to a Vax 11/750 running Berkeley 4.something UNIX in the early 1980s and being amazed at how much easier life was with a hierarchical file system.
I recall when MS-DOS 2.x was released in 1983. I believe the first version we had on our hardware was 2.05. MS-DOS got hierarchical file system and could support what seemed like a giant capacity 10 megabyte hard drive. It felt a little like being on big iron but running on a PC.
I will never have a PDP-11, but I always enjoy your “nonsense”.
Back in 1980 when I was using Color Computer someone wrote a PDP11 to Basic. Just a few fixes and I was running PDP11 on a Color Computer I did not know the speed of the PDP11 but it was slow in Basic!
There are several on eBay. A few are just $2000. Every university and medium to large business had at least one so they aren't super rare.
Man you are bringing it back. The first machine I ever wrote assembly for, the PDP-11
PDP was before my time, I'm a microVAX II and VAX Alpha user, but so heart warming to see DEC hardware still getting love.
Quick quiz: who recall the DEBUG command to start the MFM low-level format on a PC? I guessed wrong, but was close. Must be getting old! Excellent video, sir! Keep this old hardware stuff coming.
Eventually, in the 386/486 era, you started to see PC BIOSes with a fancy menu-based setup program in ROM. Some of them had a command to low-level format an MFM/RLL hard disk…but by that time, IDE was rapidly becoming a thing, making low-level formatting unnecessary (and impossible).
G=c800:5
@@wesley00042 Yup! Did you know it or have to look it up? For me, 60 years old, probably haven't used that command in ~40 years, I misremembered it as "g c800:0"... not bad, but it's a sign the memory is going. I feel HAL forgetting the words to "Daisy" as his memory modules were being yanked out. Cheers!
@@grottyboots Still remember... for now. :-)
A PDP-11 video? Oh hell yeah. This is going to be a treat, thanks for posting this. (I love collecting and reading old books about the early days of computing. The PDP and large mainframes are such fascinating machines. )
At least you have the tools to low-level format the drive! When I worked with the Pick os back in the 1980's as a developer and porting Pick to different hardware at the os assembler/driver level, there wasn't a way to format a hard disk. The Pick os treated all drives as one logical unit with a starting frame number of 1 and with the last frame number dependent upon the number/size of the installed disks. It was the job of the low-level disk device driver to convert a frame number from the os into the required disk no/cylinder/sector etc. It assumed that a drive had already been formatted and that bad blocks etc had been mapped out at the drive level. If a disk had to be low-level formatted then this had to be done using another os (we used os-9) - much to the bane of the production staff who built the systems. There wasn't even a high-level os format. As the OS treated all the disks as just one big virtual disk, there was no reason for an individual os level disk format. To install Pick on a computer you just inserted the boot floppy disk/tape and re-booted and Pick would be installed. If you wanted to extend capacity you may or may not just add an extra drive - depending upon the particular Pick implementation you had. The 'smart' versions interleaved the logical frame numbers across all of the installed disks (which improved read/write times)- so to add a new one you had to create a sysgen tape, install the disk and then re-install the os and all the files. Others 'added' the frames for the new disk at the end of the existing frames and detected this during boot and altered frame tables etc to match so there was no need to save/restore the system. And others only detected new disks during a system restore (even if the new one as 'added' at the end) so you had to save/restore the system for the new disk drive to be used.
This video and all of the comments are a blast from the past. I was a Genigraphics FE for a while. We worked on most of the DEC gear going back to 11/34 and 11/23. But, I’ll be honest. I don’t miss it.
PIP - Peripheral Interchange Program. Bringing back my early 80’s working with a PDP 11/10 at my high school.
During the late 1970s, I worked at a computer center with a PDP-11/70. The hard drives that we had were the size of washing machines, and used removable Nashua multi-platten drive packs.
When I saw the ST drive, my initial reaction was shock, as I was used to seeing the disk drives that you describe. Had no clue that they could actually use Seagate drives.
Probably RP07s
There you go again. Making me reach for a 3 ring binder on a bookshelf that no longer exists! 😁 Thanks for the trip down PDP & RSX-11 memory lane.
No wonder the uni sysadmins were considered to be gods in the old days. I first learnt to code in 1985 at Macquarie Uni (Sydney) using Fortran77 on a PDP-11 running VMS. Nice to see the hardware that was behind those VT100 terminals ...
That little Hard Disk looks just like the 20MB units I put in PCs in the 1980s.
In DOS we used a debug program to kick off the low level format. Then fdisk to partition, and finally format to make it accessible to DOS.
mine had a metal cage under it, was formatted 40MB, killed my bios chip with a bit too much low level formatting, did get it to 60MB
early pc’s had st225’s - I think dave said that was a st251 - so yeh same family
It is the same. St-225 was my first PC hard drive. $395. I still have it and can see it now on the shelf. Still running when parked. He didn't say up front, but the replacement is apparently the ST-251 which is the 43MB version, same hh form factor.
@@eliotmansfield Yeah my Atari 800XL had an ST251 HD attached to the MIO. Didn't have the big bucks for the 40MB bad boy at the time. I could be wrong but I think the ST251 was 20MB and the 225 was 40MB, but that was a long time ago.
@@msromike123 ST225 was 20MB and ST251 was 40MB. I installed and setup many of these drives back in the day in PCs. Never seen them used in a PDP11 before.
Low level format always gives me the shivers 😆
Gets me aroused.
Wow, it's been a LONG time since I saw an ST-225. These videos are really fun to watch.
Good video Dave. PIP , and those other commands - I remember PDP administrators using those same commands when I worked for Evans and Sutherland, in Salt Lake City, and I was installing the PS2 picture system on the DEC PDP 11 and VAX systems. A blast from the past!
Seeing PIP used, it suddenly dawned on me that this is probably why PIP works the way it does on CP/M. 🙂 I always assumed that Gary Kildall based the commands on something older, but I never got around to finding out what. Neat!
I remember pip from CP/M - Peripheral Interface Program if I recall correctly. I didn't really have any peripherals on my Globe Microsystems Z80 with 64k RAM and two 5.25" floppy drives so never really used it much! I wish I stll had that machine but alas I sold it in the 90s.
Wow, that brought back some memories. Pretty sure we used to use PIP to backup a PDP 11/23 to tape back in the mid 80's.
Always love your videos seem so realistic. Please keep up the good work... I wish I could recall all the information you have forgotten.
I think you might be left with very few memories...
I do miss this kind of computing. Great video.
ST-251's always make an interesting hi pitch sound when they seek. I still remember going on a call where the customer couldn't access the HDD. Was an ST-251. I noticed it was on but not spinning (you can see the shaft on the bottom. was slightly visible). It must have gotten dirt or something in the bearing. I spun it up just a bit and it took off spinning. Told him not to turn off his PC until he had gotten all of his data off of it to floppy and order a new drive.
As always your videos are amazingly relaxing to watch. And although I really haven't much of a clue with that type of hardware. Every now and then you say or mention a task or routine you are doing and it just enlighten s the research bug in me to try to figure out what rabbit hole i just fell in. Thanks and take care Mister Dave.
Great stuff! Didn't understand much of that but you did a great job of explaining that. One Dave to another Dave.
Makes me remember the days back in the 80s where PIP was a mainstay of my working day.
I still love the clackety clack of those old drives. Yes, I'm that old.
Then you'd really enjoy an Eagle HD spinning up. Sounds like a jet taking off. I no longer have the 4 I had. Donated them to a friend who could make use of them.
This is causing flashbacks to using LSI-11/02 and 11/23 QBUS machines. I remember patching RT-11 drivers to make a Priam 33 MB SMD drive look like three 10 MB RK02 drives. My first integration was on serial number 13. We had a single board Interface card that looked like either a serial or parallel port to the OS, was a parallel interface for a Tektronix 4014 terminal powered by an Intel 8086 used as a display processor for the 3D CADD system running on the DEC system.
Ver 1 could display 30K vectors per minute. Ver 2 added an 8087 and 8089 increasing display speed to 320K per minute. These speeds required the parallel interface version of the display.
We were told it was the first SBC using the 8086 designed and built in the South.
Retro terminal, with the best configuration no less!
another trip down memory lane for me - thanks
another great video. thanks for uploading Dave.
To my knowledge LBN stands for "logical block number" which is the address of a specific block of data on the storage medium. In disk operations, LBNs are used to identify the location of data for reading or writing, making abstraction of the physical structure of the disk.
Blimey, *that* dredged up some old memories...
I used to work with a pdp 11/45 with core memory ... as in iron ferrite beads with loops of wire going through each one ... 64,000 of them. :) To boot it, you set 16 toggle switches on the main panel, latch it into to the PC (program counter) and put another switch into the run position.
What a treat for Halloween!
Instead of going the PDP route in the 1970's, my father bought an AlphaMicro AM100 system (WD16 CPU, S-100 bus) using a CDC Hawk hard drive with one fixed 5 MB disk and one removable 5 MB disk. It was the size of a trash compactor. :) Later, he added a 20 MB Winchester drive that would fit in the bottom of the Hawk cabinet.
I'd like to see Lunar running. 🙂
Decades ago, we had a Vax sitting beside our test station, with a ginormous CRT monitor.
We filled the test program compile waiting time with Lunar Lander; and (therefore) I was pretty good at it.
I had the foresight to save some of the old junk I used to work with. I have a 5MB drive (8") that weighs about 20 pounds. It came from a kit Altair I think. I was also around when Shugart/Mitac began building 10MB half height 5.25" drives to go in what we used to call "The XP option" which was a 5150 with a 10MB Shugart instead of the Seagate in the logo (5160) chassis. The stories I could tell having worked for a gray marketer of IBM equipment would be astounding. Nobody would believe the crap we used to do, including at one employer, pirating BIOS chips...
You should try RSTS/E, it's nicer to use than RT-11 and RSX-11/M
I haven't thought about RT11 format in decades, IIRC it was used by CMX video editing systems to store Edit Decision Lists on floopy disks... 🤓
These are beastly. My dad has one of these. I broke my toe after dropping it while cleaning the basement, it still works but my foot don't.
Never saw a PDP but we worked on MPI/CDC disks, on the MPI 450s we adjusted the heads manually with an alignment disk pack, adjusting to the dibits with a scope :) (1980'ish)
That ST-225 was a workhorse disk. I upgraded an old Wang PC to 20 Megs back in the day.
Ahh the old Seagate ST-225. Fond memories. So many of those were used in the IBM PC-XT clones. They were reliable too. I used to have dozens of them as they were often replaced with larger drives as they came out from the manufacturers. I remember getting my first 1 gigabyte drive. A group of us at work got together and bought around 20 of them for ourselves at $1000 a piece. It was a smoking deal at the time. I felt like I was swimming in disk space at the time.
Those old drives were nearly bulletproof. I remember when they were brand new they would sometimes get errors with use unless you “broke them in” first. I would low-level format them, then run a diagnostic program that did seek tests overnight, as the alignment would shift over time, then reformat the next day and the drives usually would be solid after that.
Keep up the good work!.
A command prompt was a great toy for me back in the day. Modern computer nerds have no idea what fun and challenge using proper syntax can be.
RSX-11 on my 30 machines so I could more easily use our home grown Critical time OS!
non-masking "angry" face.. ah yes, apparently i also "make" this face... a great video for many reasons, thanks for bringing it to us dave 🍻
do you have a video on how to get that 'cool-retro-term' set up? i think its really cool you're using old hardware and new hardware in tandem like this. if i had infinite time and money i would love to do some projects with vintage computers
It is a terminal emulator available in the repositories of most Linux distros.
`apt-get install cool-retro-term`
And that's about it other than selecting the color scheme and adjusting the effects sliders (right click in the window to get settings). Debian with Xfce puts the CRT icon in the "System" section of the application menu I don't have my other systems running right now to note specific distro differences.
The neat part of these is that a variant of the 11 is still in use in many nuke plants.
That's awesome 👌
RSX11 - my favourite operating system and the one I used most of the time from 1978 to 1992. I still remember all the manual sysgen stuff we had to do (SAVe and BOOt commands needed) before the invention of autoconfiguration with M-Plus and MicroRSX. Did I spot a B2S file in there, aka a Basic+2 source code file?
I'd forgotten about PIP!! As I recall we used "PIP" as a verb as in: "I need to PIP that file over to ...."
I remember paying a small fortune for a new ST-225 back in the mid 80s. It still blows mind that I started my IT career installing 20mb drives and 40 years later I think nothing of installing a petabyte NAS.
I just watched your last few uploads thinking "where's the do it Glenn" outro...
Hi Dave, thank you for another informative and interesting video! I'm curious. What systems did you study in college for your operating system class and computer organization class? Did you study PDP-11 or program on PDP-11 in college?
Boy, it’s been about 40 years since I did that stuff. Literally brings back memories. Literally.
Wow, I had forgotten about pip. Worked with pdp-11s from 1977 until about 2002 with RSX-11M / Plus. Ported pdp-11 software to Vax, modcomp, and eventually Linux.
Non-masking face!!! Love it!!
Oh man, the venerable Seagate ST225 hard drives! They were everywhere, including lots of PCs. Didn't that use a band/stepper instead of a voice coil?
Yes, the ST506 style drives from that era all used bands and stepper motors. You could hear them chirp when the heads seeked. Some higher end drives used voice coils, but those didn’t become mainstream until the 90s sometime.
Hi Dave, fantastic channel. I've just spotted something in the classic film Wargames. When David dials into his schools computer, did the school really have a PDP 11/270? On the terminal login screen top left it shows this. What does TTY 34/984 mean?
Keep up the great work Dave, you have a fascinating channel.
Cheers
Col, UK.
As a software developer I have absolutely zero idea what you were doing here but I enjoyed watching.
hardware stuff. someone else's problem
Format a drive and add a file system to it, like we all still do on modern PCs (fat, NTFS, ext4, xfs, and so on).
Interesting video.
I wish I had a work shop that nice
@Dave - Could you provide some details re the hardware setup for this pdp11 please. What floppy drives/controller are used? What controller is used for the hard disk? Did you build this from parts or did you acquire 'as is' - as this case isn't listed for a PDP11/83 computer as far as I can see?
Great video though. More on PDP11s please! They were and remain my favourite mini-computers. Back in the 1970/80s I enjoyed assembler programming (with RT11 and for bare-metal) - and still do!. I've written about four pdp11 assemblers in different languages over the years with my latest in C++. PDP11 is IMO a really nice assembly language and was the first I learnt.
I'm currently finalising a multi-user (using DZ11) snake program (see usagi electric pdp11 discord forum) in assembler as a bare-metal program. Unfortunately I don't have an actual PDP11 and have to make do with simh. Doh!
Keep up the good work :)
I believe from memory these drives will support the 1st version of windows. I believe theres a few archive sites online with copy's of antique software like captain comic, space invaders, asteroid , front page which is a word processor and so on .
Once I had picked one of those up to move it. Partly because it was heavier than expected, I dropped it on the floor, & the HD didn't survive. But I kept my job 🙂
Thank you! Old home week! pip
Saw the date stamps for files. Crazy how they had no y2k issues but later home PCs did. Always thought the tech wasn't there is all
Cool stuff, Dave! I remember working on dual PDP-11/70 systems for my first real programming. It was RSTS/E and BASIC-PLUS all the way. Do you have anything that can run RSTS/E?
It was only later releases of RSX11M that introduced DCL commands like DIR, TYP, DEL etc. Under the covers it was still the old PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program) command like in earlier releases: PIP /LI, PIP TI:=filename.ext, PIP filename.ext/DE
I need a screen like that.
The unmistakable whine of that drive...
I just had a flashback of working on pdp11/23 RT11 with 2 floppies and 2 RL02 removable diskpack drives. I was nearly done with a project when my boss came rushing in: "I need to quickly copy this floppy over to this other floppy. Can I jump in real quick?" I said sure. I watched as she typed COPY /DEVICE DU0: DL1: /NOQ That copied her floppy block for block over the top of my RL02. I had some week-old backups and a recent printout so it only took me 2 days to recover.
I would love it if you could find an RL01 or RL02 and get that working and show everyone.
I remember going to an expose of the first TI-99 hard drive. it was about 5 x 4. It6 held 5mb and the salesman's pitch was, this holds more memory than you will ever need. I was astonished at his stupidity.
You lucky devil ! My PDP11 has an 8" hard drive.
I remember the days when you hit the enter key and heard your HD go "zzz-zzzdt" and then saw the results on screen. The 8088 days..expectations were somewhat lower then...
I see these DIR and PIP commands and now I know that CP/M idea was to have as much of PDP/11 as possible on a micro
The important lesson here is to write the commands correctly like Dave does. Do not execute before the command is written.
I used a pdp 11 to do assembly language when I was at UCSD in 86. We had a huge floppy disk to store our files. I think it was 8 inch diameter.
Liked for the dog.
1978 and 2019 as the file dates? Are these original create dates? I've used many VAX/ALPHA systems but never a PDP. Cool!
Your videos always leave a mark in my heart and mind. Thank you for your creativity and passion!🚘👀🥿
That PDP-11 looked like a Storage Heater......looked like it weighed as much too...😊
Wow. I didn't know they made PDPs that small.
I wonder why it's got all that heavy metal plating. RF shielding?
feel sorry for us DEC Field Service Engineers - we never had the benefit of a two man lift !
But we were young...
The UIT question isn't asking for a unit number. It's looking for the number that indicates what type of drive you are formatting. The ST-251 drive is an RD32. When you answered 0, you indicated it was an RD50 - a much smaller drive. You should have answered 6, for RD32. It would have formatted longer, and made the entire disk usable.
Ah, nostalgia. I cut my teeth on PDP8,PDP11,PDP15 and later PDP10 computers. Still remember taking several weeks recovering a hard drive with the data for my PhD after accidentally doing “dir /z” instead of “dir /s” at 2:30am🤦♂️
Old software used to be so verbal. Today you would simply get a "Sorry, something went wrong" error and have to click OK and go back to square one. You know, don't want to confuse the user with all those complicated errors or have to code in actual error handling.
Love the content, but please introduce your dog. Beautiful!
Not everyone likes dogs, so hopefully not.
❤❤❤
Totally random fun fact.
As a technician in the 80's, I sold and installed plenty of ST-225s in PCs.
When I started watching the series CSI, amongst the background noise I could swear I heard the unmistakable sound of the ST-225 stepper motor.
Can anyone corroborate this? It's in like every episode of CSI Vegas.
Old dusty but goody❤
I don't know if I understand what I just saw; whatever it was, it was good.
i remember those as mfm/rll drives playing wolfenstein ..
Nice 🙂
That was my tender years system, RT/11
Love your nonsense 😊
Proper computing 🙂how it was - Real
Pretty sure my first HDD was one of those Seagates. Pretty sure you could abuse those drives however you wanted and they would still work.
Would the os run slower if it's on the physical drive and not on the virtual one and if it was on the real drive would it only affect booting up? and how would you see the term on your mac if it was ?
Yeah older computers were heavy as sin, but it also never had you questioning whether you could effectively use it as a weapon if someone breaks in. Just imagine some dude chucking a 'ME era tower or monitor at you, not a fun thought.