I wrote the smooth scroll firmware for the VT240 terminal for which I am co-inventor on a software patent. In the VT300 series smooth scrolling is controlled by a hardware chip. I also contributed to the design of the VT2xx series setup mode, which is the same as the VT3xx that you showed here. We decided to get rid of DIP switches because they cost money and aren't user friendly. I cut my teeth on PDP-11s and also worked on PDP-8 and DECSYSTEM 10/20, so it's great fun to see them still running after all these years. These museum pieces make me feel like a fossil myself. The most enduring feature of the VT2xx design project was the LK-201 keyboard layout, which became the standard for PC keyboards years later. The LK-201 introduced the "inverted T" arrow key formation and 6-key navigation cluster that now sits between the QUERTY keyboard and the number pad. I sat through many arguments about where keys should go but the most controversial was the Escape key. We argued incessantly over this.
I found it amazing. 1. Does it use "graphical mode" instead of "text mode"? 2. Is it capable of scrolling only half a line or something similar? 3. Does it interrupt other CPU tasks while scrolling? 4. Does it truly scroll pixel by pixel or does it skip (jump) a line or two of pixels each time?
@@MarcoMugnatto As far as I understand these things, it's fully implemented in the terminal ... and doesn't have any interaction whatsoever with the CPU.
That smooth scrolling is the most beautiful I've ever seen in the computing world. Thank you for the contribution! Did we downgrade ourselves?? Do modern terminals do that kind of smooth scrolling??
Smooth scroll may be "cool" but I hated it. First, the persistence of the phosphor meant that the characters were blurry while it was scrolling. Second, it slows everything down. If several lines are written quickly, you have to wait for the smooth scroll to catch up to be able to read them. The old jump scroll was faster. For those reasons, I always turned it off.
The VT-340s I used back in the day (early 90s in college) all suffered convergence issues to varying degrees. So monochrome might be the better choice anyway.
@@russellhltn1396 I agree. The delay is really annoying when you're trying to get something done. Also, I would crank up the baud rate, unless you want to feel death as you work :)
You have a 22 bit addressing limit (4MB) and the top 8K is used for I/O devices. I remember when this was something to dream of. The PDP 11/23 I used only had 18 bit addressing (256K) and two 5MB RL01 drives. We upgraded it to the 22 bit 11/23 PLUS with the massive 10MB RL02 drives. Luxury!
I was looking at the memory map and the "oddity" with the second memory card was immediately obvious when he scrolled to the next page: 8K reserved for IO.
It's wild to think about how fast technology has changed, here's a few more mind blowers. 26 years ago, 1gb was doable, but considered severe overkill for a Personal Computer. Now 8 times that is considered the minimum despite comparable usage habits. 16 years ago, 1tb in a single HDD was pure fantasy. Now 1tb of NVMe is considered "the norm". 10/100 "Fast Ethernet" was standardized in 1992 and took until 2019 to be replaced with "Gigabit", despite Gigabit being standardized just 3 years later in 1995.
@@KiraSlith I wouldn't say that the usage is comparable - now you have 10 browser tabs open, a messaging client or five and multiple video streams playing simultaneously.
@@barbudoru I mean, technically you can do all that on 8gb, but it's a pretty miserable experience. Lots of memory paging that'll eventually wear out your SSD. Although apparently Chrome does it's own paging with TH-cam either way so... 🙄
Man I freaking love how those old VT terminals had the smooth scrolling feature on them. I wish that were still a thing with modern terminal emulators.
❤ I worked with PDPs in the 80s and absolutely loved these machines. Thanks for taking me back to the time of 20 year-old me and a golden era in computing!
My lab at Intel had about a dozen pdp 11/23 back in the late 80s early 90s. Most were dual 8" floppy, running RT11 and VT100 terminals. They were used to gather data from test equipment that was testing EPROMS. The data was stored on the 8" floppies, then carried (sneaker net) to a larger 11/23 that had two RL02 disk drives. I wrote code (mostly in Pascal) to analyze the data and generate reports. Reports were printed on drum printers onto green bar paper. Eventually they were all replaced with machines with 8086 cpu and real networks. Keeping all the pdp 11 running required that I had a cabinet full of spares, cpu, memory, serial cards etc. Seeing your collection brings back memories.
Seeing this terminal & keyboard brings me back to my early university days. I would spend hours & hours working on programming assignments on one of these in a large room filled with dozens of them. It was on a terminal like this there where I first discovered MUD's & IRC.
Wow! That brings back memories. We used a pdp11 running Zenix on a JCON system in the late 80's for an auto parts store. Had 4 terminals. Later on, as other companies were upgrading, I managed to find another unit from a drug store. It had more memory than our original one so I used one of the memory cards to expand the memory in our system. The memory Card was HUGE. We had to use the floppy disc for backup. Toward the end it was taking over 50 disc to do a backup. Upgraded to a 386 20 mhz with a tape backup a few years later.
i learned assy language programming at ucsd using pdp-11. was the most difficult class i ever passed. remember being awake 18 hours a day reading and re-reading each chapter until i could understand the concepts.
Watching this makes me want to get some of my old DEC hardware working, something besides my coffee cup. PDP 11, VAX, Alpha, even a Rainbow would make me happy.
I cut my teeth on a PDP11 after Apple II and BBC Micro days at university, before moving onto Apollo (then HP & Sun) gear. Love this vintage of equipment ❤
I love to see this pdp working again, long time ago I was a pdp collector mostly 11/23 11/04 and a 11/70. Sadly due to moving to another home all where scrapped, this was 30 year ago. Very nice to see this great old stuff coming to life again.
+1 for how awesome the DEC VT320 terminals are. I did data entry for an entire summer in the late 80's (job during college break) on this terminal connected to a PDP-11 and the terminal screen was easy on the eyes and its keyboard was very comfortable to type on.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I don’t remember the DEC part number, but I liked the keyboard used on the Rainbow / VT220 / VT240 and probably some other DEC offerings. It wasn’t quite as comfortable as the IBM 5150 keyboard, and the width took a lot of desk real estate, but all in all not bad and fairly rugged.
13:14 DEC terminal's smooth scrolling looks so cool that I almost wanted that on my computer. Then I realized I would be waiting 10 minutes after typing dmesg command 😂
I was working in Hong Kong Polytechnic as an Analyst Programmer II, and my first task at work was a BASIC program running on a PDP 11/73 running RSTS/E operating systems....those were the days of fun, because every BASIC pragram needs to be compiled within maximum 64K of memory...Yes, it's 64K, and we need to do page swapping !!! Modern programmers won't imagine this back into the mid 80's. Love this video, and I still missed all those VT220s, VT320s, and VT420s terminal, and they were so robust !
I did FORTRAN programming for tracing brain slice images from a stepper motor controlled microscope stage on a PDP-11/34 with 32K words running RT-11. The compile and link of a FORTRAN program of 500 or so lines could take minutes. I really liked working with the VR-17 X-Y vector display with light pen. I also played around with BASIC on RSTS. My recollection was the BASIC interpreter was pretty true to the Dartmouth documentation for BASIC.
sweet.... we used to have a vax-station over at the AMF bowling alley i used to work at in the mid 90s. i was the only one that knew anything about it and was a cool piece of kit to play with
Great work! Thanks for sharing - I really am jealous. Worked on PDP-11s from 23s to 73s to 83 and truly wanted a 93.. (all Q-bus) ... also worked pdp-11/40 (Unibus) too. btw did you know -- odd model number = q-bus, even = Unibus? Used RSX-11M Plus mainly with F77 (Fortran) for material handling supervisory control of PLCs. I really am jealous. Please load RSX-11 as it will allow the most functionality of the hardware and is also multi-user environment. Love to see RMD again.. resource management display -- shows what 's in memory and where in real time. Can't wait...
love your dedication but as a long time technician my first action with the power supply would be replace all the electrolytic capacitors. use the best 105c you can get.
The smooth scrolling looks neat, but it is too slow to use for long. I had a VT100, then VT220, then VT320, then VT240 in my office. Of those, the VT220 was probably the best compromise between performance and build quality. The way the VT terminals operate, what is to be displayed is stored as a linked list in memory. This makes it relatively quick to update a screen because a line can be easily added into or deleted from the center of the display by changing the pointers into the list. The terminal can also function as a viewport into a virtual screen larger than the physical X-Y dimensions of the terminal. The problem is that memory gets fragmented as the display updates. Every so often, the CPU has to pause to garbage collect to consolidate memory. When that happens, the terminal asserts flow control back to the host. There’re an input ring buffer in the terminal, but the buffer can overrun and wrap, losing data. The pause key on the keyboard with also cause the CPU to immediately quit updating the display list and freeze the screen and issue flow control. Again, the input buffer may overrun if the host does not recognize flow control quickly enough and stop sending. To the terminal user, chunks of text may mysteriously go missing.
Wow! A genuine VT-320! Haven't seen one of those since the late '80s when I was attending Georgia Tech. One of the *many* computer labs on campus had a PDP-11, and the lab had about a dozen of these terminals hooked up to it. Man, that brings back some memories -- can't believe how long ago that was.
Dang, I can't believe how nice that scrolling is -at 9600baud!- I have to admit I didn't think PDP-11s were that small, I thought they were all Centurion sized or bigger. Nice to see that badass tower in action.
Scrolling does not depend on baud rate. It's handled internally on VT terminal. There were many different sizes of PDP-11s. Everything from desktop PC size to multi-cabinet ones.
DEC terminals used XON/XOFF flow control. So if data was coming faster than it could be displayed, the terminal would tell the computer to stop sending until it caught up.
Looks like you're off to a good start with this rig, compared to the hell you went through to get the Centurion to boot! Curious to see what all you can do with this. IMHO, I think this system is quite a bit more refined than the Centurion, just from the boot ROM display. L👀king forward to more!😉👍
I used to use PDP-11/03/04... Machine controllers used in electronic assembly machines from early universal instruments thru hole BCD assembly and rotary sequencer machines. the sequencer puts the parts in order for the VCD to place them on the PCB. Good and bad memories, mostly good as a service and programming guy
Look to see if you have RT-11; it's a single-user OS, fairly simple to boot up, and can be run off of floppies. RSX-11M is a multi-user system that requires a hard drive and a more involved system configuration ("SYSGEN").
It could, but I don’t know about the specific graphics board mentioned. Finding surviving software, if it ever existed, would be the hard part. What was a pretty snazzy graphics board in 1983 would be agonizingly slow now. I had a Sun 3/160 which had Sun’s advanced graphics which occupied two full VME slots connecting to a Hitachi monitor which weighed about 150 pounds, connected by three BNCs each about as thick as a pinky finger. With all that, it could take seconds to render the X version of Sunclock full screen on the X client running on top of SunOS 4.11. I don’t remember for sure, but I believe the resolution was 1152 x 900 pixels. The Sun 3 power supply was labeled “1.5 KW” and I believe the system used most of it. The Sun 3 definitely warmed up the room. It might be fun to say you revived old hardware, but it would be agonizing to use it for much time, being accustomed to how fast PCs do work now. Even a Raspberry Pi Zero W2 beats the pants off my old Sun 3/160. I donated my Sun 3/160 to a university amateur radio club in 1993 mostly because it was too expensive to run 24x7 and it made my house hot. The club used the Sun as a packet radio Internet gateway for a number of years because the university did not charge them for the electric consumption.
@@charliekahn4205 Early builds of X11 would run comfortably with 8MB of RAM, which is not outside the PDP-11's parameters. It's just the matter of _finding_ an early build.
Really excited to see your pdp11 grow! I was lucky enough to be seconded from the UK to work at Cutler Hammer, Fenton, Michigan for 3 months in 1978. My task was to develop a software program to run on a Motorola 8-bit CPU. Cutler Hammer Fenton was only a small division of the main HQ in Milwaukee and only had around 50 to 100 employees but they had a fully blown massive pdp10 mainframe system as well as at least one pdp11 and countless other smaller systems. I used the pdp11 with a cross assembler for the Motorola 6800. It was heaven for a 24 year old graduate from the UK. Seeing you working passionately to revive these iconic DEC computers brings back many great memories of a computing era now far in the past. Please keep these videos coming.
So the plan is to install the Matrox card and a few disks, and maybe something to connect it to a network? That would give you a very capable PDP-11 desktop system to take to exhibitions.
Oh man, a Vax or PDP-11 machine has been on my dream wishlist for years. I had a teacher who gave me a bunch of her old computer manuals and programming books to learn from when I was in high school, and the book I did the most reading in was a VAX/VMS manual. I've wanted to experience one ever since then and it's been 15-ish years.
I became a pdp and vax admin in my early 20s I am now 54. I loved every minute and your enthusiasm is thrilling. I remember that feeling. We had an intergraph modified pdp 11/70. One day it wouldn’t boot. We found if we thumped the 8 inch floppy it would boot. Oh happy days, it was my favourite job. It was the same place the electrician put his screw driver across a three phase supply and blew himself across the room into the pdp. He survived but was smoking.
Welcome to my world :D I first saw a uPDP boot in 1985 when I was given one at work to port our applications to MicroRSX. I still have an u11/73 and today I picked up a boxful of QBUS and UNIBUS cards from (I think) an 11/40 or 11/70. Still need to go through them. Looking forward to more PDP!
The differing sizes displayed for the two memory cards is because the top 8Kb of address space are reserved for I/O. Smooth scrolling on the VT320 (a feature inherited from the VT100 which introduced it) works by advancing the display one scan line per frame.
I worked for GE from '83 to '89 and the terminal brings back memories. We were using the VAX series, but my senior engineer was an expert with the PDP-11.
I worked at GE Aviation around 2005. They still had these VAX computers. They were used for testing some Air force equipment. To re-tool the test system with modern equipment was just too much government red tape.
I didn't appreciate what a wide range of computing power levels the PDP-11 models over the years represented until now! This machine would make an awesome UNIX system! Over the past year I have come to see the wisdom behind the development of UNIX for the sake of making a good development environment for career programmers trying to develop applications for the ever more powerful systems coming out every year. I bet a lot of the systems of this vintage became the backbone of the publishing industry for that decade.
I can't believe how far you have come since I first started following you (you were _just_ getting started on the tube computer). Your lab is starting to look pretty epic. I love the PDP/11, but I'm very excited for some 12k RPM action happening soon. *THAT* is truly rare stuff. The (vsync matched) smooth scrolling was also used by Regnecentralen's CP/M computers and I never understood why it wasn't more widespread - even today!
smooth vsync'ed scrolling: I suspect there are simply too few people caring about this. Personally, I prefer a lightning fast terminal over a vsync'ed as the latter will always be much slower.
I can totally relate to your giddy excitement when you get some old hardware to run! Something only other vintage computer nerds can relate to :D. Be EXTREMELY careful with the plastic of that old DEC hardware, especially the VT320. I have a VT520 which has been crumbling before my very eyes. Whatever injection molded plastic DEC used wasn't designed to last more than a few decades. Its at the point where its in bits and pieces now which glue cant save. I may end up making a wooden VT520 case with all the guts of the simply because its now structurally unsound. Yeah I just love the amber display of those old DEC terminals.
I worked at Digital in Canada and had a VT320 connected to a burn-in chamber running heating/cooling cycles on multiple main boards to test for thermal related faults. This was back in 1993 and the monitor and keyboard looked about as dirty as what you cleaned.
Wow, I haven’t seen a PDP-11 run or a VT terminal since around 1987. We had them in various rack mount forms running in the “Message Relay Centre” of the Australian Overseas Telecommunications Commission. Basically we took telex messages in from around the world and reformatted them for local distribution. The PDP’s were workhorses used for a bunch of different tasks with the most interesting being the support to keep a pair of Univac 418’s running. These old dinosaurs ran the production software for the entire message relay centre and were built using magnetic core memory and “Fastrand drums” for storage. The cost to replace the 418s was prohibitive and the drums were getting pretty unreliable and almost impossible to fix. They were around 12’ long and weighed a couple of tons each. The PDPs were used to emulate the drums to the Univacs and wrote out to “Modern” lol removable media disc drives…. Best part of them was that we had a tech test system that was non-production that we could learn on, and of course, it could play Zork lol.
I had to pause when I saw the Bomem INC address on the manual, that's right here in Québec city! It's like a 10min drive from my apartment, the building now houses a handful of businesses, the main one being a coffee and spice distributor. I knew we had AdLib on Grande-Allée back in the day, but I didn't know we had another computer hardware company in the city at the time! And of course Matrox was based in Montréal, but that's more widely known as they were a huge deal in the world of computer graphics
You have all this DEC equipment and you've never booted a PDP-11? Actually, you still haven't booted one, since the system told you there were no bootable devices.
Even when you booted with just 2Mb, the I/O addresses were at the top 8Kb of the 4th Mb (17757770 through 17777776). when you added the 2nd 2Mb the last 8Kb couldn't be used as it's already mapped off.
Cleaning old keyboards is a special sort of tedious that is only enjoyed by folks that find it meditative :) Related, i had found that soaking the cables for cleaning leads to a grab-bag of odd symptoms due to water getting inside the outer sheathing. Those with phone service on older copper cables have hear what water on the line sounds like! The risk is reduced by keeping the ends out of the solution but the sheathing may have tiny cracks from age. It goes extra pear-shaped if the insulation on the conductors inside has also cracked with age. My fix is to pretend the cable is a cat - sprawl it out in a nice warm sun beam for a couple days.
I've only seen one running PDP-11 that I can recall and that was in the mid-1990s at the aircraft plant where my father worked. It was connected to a power analysis system mounted to a large cart.
As a data entry operator at a multisite medical lab back in 1987, I kept the smooth scrolling off as it was so slow it didn't keep up with the fields being entered. Seeing that again triggered that irritation, lol. Nightly tape backups on the vaxes. And nightly hard copy dumps on dot matrix printers that always jammed. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Those VT320s are lovely and compact but I always feel "for authenticity" you "need" a VT100. I used to have a mono VGA monitor that I'm sure was more or less identical to that VT320........ Didn't DEC make some PCs in later years.
You have inspired me. I have many hours using older systems. So what I decided to try is to make a 'sleeper' version of some older x86 Sun gear that I am used to working on. I basically keep the case and install much newer hardware. Then I can run a bunch of VMs. Waiting on parts still. Fingers crossed that I can cram it all in there. But I am all excited to try it.
Thanks for the reminder, I’d almost forgotten Sun dabbled in X86 hardware for a while. I ran Solaris 86 on a generic Pentium-90 PC at home running NCSA’s web server for a while with an Internet connection over a 256Kbit ISDN connection. Installing Sun packages was a pain in the neck and fighting off Russian hackers trying to break in was pretty much a continuous thing. Those were the days.
I repaired those PDPs and VAXes for years. I did exactly what you did... but I also replaced all capacitors. For the terminal, the smooth scroll can be changed in the settings (smooth slow, fast or jump). Don't forget to save the new settings. Otherwise the terminal will load the old settings after a power cycle. To do a "load defaults" would also be a good idea since you don't know what the former owner did. (And save again) For the memories, you need to check if the DIP switch settings are correct. There is a starting address for each memory board. The first goes from zero to 2048kB and the second starts at 2048 and goes to 4096kB. If those switches are not set correctly, you get an overlap of the two ranges. That could be the reason for the "2040kB" display.
Congratulations on getting your machine running!!! At Mostek we used RSX-11D on our PDP11/70, and an 11/34. We connected the two with DECnet, it was my job to get that up and running. The link ran between buildings that were about a quarter mile apart. I felt so accomplished when I got the link up. I wrote an application for the 11/34 in MACRO-11 that could buffer data using linked lists which managed data flow between the two systems. I modeled it after a linked list program I’d written in Pascal. When you’re used to programming in Assembler, it’s a snap to understand list pointers. The application would transparently pass data unless the link went down, then it would buffer it to disk until the link came back up. It also cached testing programs sent down, in case a test system needed one when the link was down. I was pretty proud of that program despite not being a formally trained programmer. Hell, back then, no one was formally trained. We just read books and manuals until we understood what we were doing. I’m a hardware and software engineer, which gave me a huge advantage over both camps back then.
Thanks for the reminder. DECnet was kind of funky over Ethernet because it would change the MAC address from the BIA on the interface. We had a few Vaxes running Berkeley UNIX, one running Ultrix and several VMS machines. UNIX and Ultrix supported TCP/IP natively, but we had to run and add-on 3rd party TCP/IP suite on VMS until DEC thankfully natively supported TCP/IP on VMS. We used 3Com terminal servers to connect several hundred terminals over Ethernet back to the Vaxes. Well heeled labs had PCs with Ethernet cards talking directly to the minicomputers in the machine room. I liked administering UNIX a lot better thanks to more terse interaction with the O/S. VMS was quite similar to TOPS-20 I’d first used in the 1970s and, shall we say, rather chatty. I’m reminded of VMS now by the rather verbose commands in Windows PowerShell required for doing Wizard level work in Active Directory.
@@yonaguska2050 We looked at quite a few nascent network technologies in the early 1980s: Banyan Vines, DECnet, Token Ring, Apple LocalTalk, ARCnet. Those are ones I remember off the cuff, there were probably others as well. I read William Stallings classic series of networking books and made the case for TCP/IP over 10base5 thick cable. We installed our first segment in the summer of 1983, pulling 1600 feet of triple shielded plenum rated cable in one piece. That was a lot of physical work! Before that time, we used muxes from Black Box to combine 8 serial lines at time from our machine room to office areas. The Ethernet replaced the muxes with Bridge terminal servers (later to be absorbed into 3Com) which had 14 serial ports to open telnet sessions back to the hosts. Then Bridge units had a 68000 CPU and proprietary operating environment (it wasn’t really a full O/S) which booted from a 5.25 inch floppy. I actually did have one tiny ARCnet which only connected one management PC to a Multitech modem bank. We also later ran Novell IPX/SPX over Ethernet simultaneously with TCP/IP. PCs eventually got network cards and terminal servers were gradually retired in areas no longer needing them. PCs had mostly 3Com cards of several types which were supported by Clarkson packet drivers allowing the NetWare stack and TCP/IP stack to coexist in MS-DOS. MacIntosh was a little more difficult to support. Asante made pretty decent cards for Mac IIs and the like which had VME(?) slots, but those cards were TCP/IP. Running TCP/IP natively on NetWare wasn’t really good until 4.1 and we transitioned from NetWare to Windows NT for file services by then.
If I saw that scroll in a movie, I'd laugh and say how fake that is. But... I'd be totally and shamefully wrong. 🤣 Let me know when you get Doom running on it! This excitement is infectious. Great video!
Back in the late 80's using a terminal like that for my Fortran 77 class that smooth scrolling seemed so so sssssmmmmmooooootttttthhhhh! Ain't nothing like sharing your VAX 11/780 with a few hundred of your fellow classmates. But hey, I was living in poverty and using a 32 bit computer.
Brings back some very old memories, over 30 years ago I was PDP engineer - I used to work onsite travelling around customers, fixing down to component level with circuit diagrams, especially on PDP11/70's and all of the peripherals attached. Thank you
The PDP-11 has memory mapped I/O in the top of the 4MB address space, so that (small) portion of RAM will always be obscured by the I/O page and unavailable.
This brings back memories of me learning to program in COBOL on an already 18 year old vax VMS system in the 90's. We used a very similar keyboard/monitor setup. It had better version control built in than Windows and Linux, and Mac OS have today. I'm now a software developer. I'm a huge DEC fan!
That butter-smooth scrolling reminds me of the Visual 200 terminals that the University of Canterbury had when I was an undergrad in the 1980s. I thought they were utterly cool at the time!
Nice to see the machine start up with no problems. You are going to have lots of fun with all those PDP-11 items. I've always liked the smooth scrolling on those old terminals.
Yo if you want to get rid of yellowing on beige plastic, make a hydrogen peroxide + gum Arabic paste... brush it on, wrap in 'saran wrap', and leave in the sun or under UV light.
Back in the day if you had a drive that wasn't used for a while it was a good idea to 'refresh' them. By reading and rewriting every sector to bring the magnetics back up to snuff. I don't know the utility program for pdp 11 (or if it evens needs such a thing) but given how old the drives are you may want to do that sooner rather then later.
I wrote the smooth scroll firmware for the VT240 terminal for which I am co-inventor on a software patent. In the VT300 series smooth scrolling is controlled by a hardware chip. I also contributed to the design of the VT2xx series setup mode, which is the same as the VT3xx that you showed here. We decided to get rid of DIP switches because they cost money and aren't user friendly. I cut my teeth on PDP-11s and also worked on PDP-8 and DECSYSTEM 10/20, so it's great fun to see them still running after all these years. These museum pieces make me feel like a fossil myself. The most enduring feature of the VT2xx design project was the LK-201 keyboard layout, which became the standard for PC keyboards years later. The LK-201 introduced the "inverted T" arrow key formation and 6-key navigation cluster that now sits between the QUERTY keyboard and the number pad. I sat through many arguments about where keys should go but the most controversial was the Escape key. We argued incessantly over this.
I found it amazing.
1. Does it use "graphical mode" instead of "text mode"?
2. Is it capable of scrolling only half a line or something similar?
3. Does it interrupt other CPU tasks while scrolling?
4. Does it truly scroll pixel by pixel or does it skip (jump) a line or two of pixels each time?
@@MarcoMugnatto As far as I understand these things, it's fully implemented in the terminal ... and doesn't have any interaction whatsoever with the CPU.
Ohh the smooth scroll was epic
Niceee
That smooth scrolling is the most beautiful I've ever seen in the computing world. Thank you for the contribution! Did we downgrade ourselves?? Do modern terminals do that kind of smooth scrolling??
The smooth scroll with the amber just has such a sense of classiness. Of course color will be awesome too haha. Really nice, congrats!
I wasn't allowed to have a vt320.... Too nice for my pay grade. Take your VT100 at 9600 baud and be happy.
I think there’s an option in the setup menu to turn smooth scroll on and off
Smooth scroll may be "cool" but I hated it. First, the persistence of the phosphor meant that the characters were blurry while it was scrolling. Second, it slows everything down. If several lines are written quickly, you have to wait for the smooth scroll to catch up to be able to read them. The old jump scroll was faster. For those reasons, I always turned it off.
The VT-340s I used back in the day (early 90s in college) all suffered convergence issues to varying degrees. So monochrome might be the better choice anyway.
@@russellhltn1396 I agree. The delay is really annoying when you're trying to get something done. Also, I would crank up the baud rate, unless you want to feel death as you work :)
32 concurrent user Zork party!!!!!
Oh my that would be so magical
I've still got my BASIC/Plus terminal to terminal chat program laying around somewhere?
This is the way…
You have a 22 bit addressing limit (4MB) and the top 8K is used for I/O devices. I remember when this was something to dream of. The PDP 11/23 I used only had 18 bit addressing (256K) and two 5MB RL01 drives. We upgraded it to the 22 bit 11/23 PLUS with the massive 10MB RL02 drives. Luxury!
I was looking at the memory map and the "oddity" with the second memory card was immediately obvious when he scrolled to the next page: 8K reserved for IO.
It's wild to think about how fast technology has changed, here's a few more mind blowers. 26 years ago, 1gb was doable, but considered severe overkill for a Personal Computer. Now 8 times that is considered the minimum despite comparable usage habits. 16 years ago, 1tb in a single HDD was pure fantasy. Now 1tb of NVMe is considered "the norm". 10/100 "Fast Ethernet" was standardized in 1992 and took until 2019 to be replaced with "Gigabit", despite Gigabit being standardized just 3 years later in 1995.
5MB drives!! Why you would *never* run out of space! ;-)
@@KiraSlith I wouldn't say that the usage is comparable - now you have 10 browser tabs open, a messaging client or five and multiple video streams playing simultaneously.
@@barbudoru I mean, technically you can do all that on 8gb, but it's a pretty miserable experience. Lots of memory paging that'll eventually wear out your SSD. Although apparently Chrome does it's own paging with TH-cam either way so... 🙄
Man I freaking love how those old VT terminals had the smooth scrolling feature on them. I wish that were still a thing with modern terminal emulators.
❤ I worked with PDPs in the 80s and absolutely loved these machines. Thanks for taking me back to the time of 20 year-old me and a golden era in computing!
My lab at Intel had about a dozen pdp 11/23 back in the late 80s early 90s. Most were dual 8" floppy, running RT11 and VT100 terminals. They were used to gather data from test equipment that was testing EPROMS. The data was stored on the 8" floppies, then carried (sneaker net) to a larger 11/23 that had two RL02 disk drives. I wrote code (mostly in Pascal) to analyze the data and generate reports. Reports were printed on drum printers onto green bar paper. Eventually they were all replaced with machines with 8086 cpu and real networks. Keeping all the pdp 11 running required that I had a cabinet full of spares, cpu, memory, serial cards etc. Seeing your collection brings back memories.
Seeing this terminal & keyboard brings me back to my early university days. I would spend hours & hours working on programming assignments on one of these in a large room filled with dozens of them. It was on a terminal like this there where I first discovered MUD's & IRC.
I was given one to take home for remote support. I was a riot typing in the modem commands to dial into the host.
ATDT FTW!!
I used to dream of using a crt terminal when I was writing the early versions of MUD!!
Wow! That brings back memories. We used a pdp11 running Zenix on a JCON system in the late 80's for an auto parts store. Had 4 terminals. Later on, as other companies were upgrading, I managed to find another unit from a drug store. It had more memory than our original one so I used one of the memory cards to expand the memory in our system. The memory Card was HUGE. We had to use the floppy disc for backup. Toward the end it was taking over 50 disc to do a backup. Upgraded to a 386 20 mhz with a tape backup a few years later.
As an ex system administrator of a herd of Vaxen, this brings back many memories :)
I've always loved the term Vaxen, even if as a young dial-up user i hated /using/ Vaxen. ;)
i learned assy language programming at ucsd using pdp-11. was the most difficult class i ever passed. remember being awake 18 hours a day reading and re-reading each chapter until i could understand the concepts.
i always get jealous, seeing you play with those cool computers... really awesome work. keep it up!
Watching this makes me want to get some of my old DEC hardware working, something besides my coffee cup. PDP 11, VAX, Alpha, even a Rainbow would make me happy.
Thanks dude! I have not seen one of those running in so long. Gives me Immediate memories of my childhood.
I cut my teeth on a PDP11 after Apple II and BBC Micro days at university, before moving onto Apollo (then HP & Sun) gear. Love this vintage of equipment ❤
One of my first Mini computers was a PDP 11/45 running RSTS/E. I miss that guy!
I love to see this pdp working again, long time ago I was a pdp collector mostly 11/23 11/04 and a 11/70. Sadly due to moving to another home all where scrapped, this was 30 year ago. Very nice to see this great old stuff coming to life again.
Ah, octal addresses. You have taken a giant step forward. Congrats!
+1 for how awesome the DEC VT320 terminals are. I did data entry for an entire summer in the late 80's (job during college break) on this terminal connected to a PDP-11 and the terminal screen was easy on the eyes and its keyboard was very comfortable to type on.
The DEC LK201 keyboard had a shorter travel than other keyboards. This made it fast to type on, but some also claimed it made you more prone to RSI.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I don’t remember the DEC part number, but I liked the keyboard used on the Rainbow / VT220 / VT240 and probably some other DEC offerings. It wasn’t quite as comfortable as the IBM 5150 keyboard, and the width took a lot of desk real estate, but all in all not bad and fairly rugged.
Great, it is so long since I used a PDP-11. I am 71 now and I did not expect to see one working again. Those were great machines! Congratulations!
WOW! Great! To tell the truth I'm also planning to dig in PDP-11. It's soviet implementation to be correct
Hi. I would love to see the next video! I was an AIX admin on powerpc, and RSX is totally uncharted territory for me.
13:14 DEC terminal's smooth scrolling looks so cool that I almost wanted that on my computer.
Then I realized I would be waiting 10 minutes after typing dmesg command 😂
That bootloader is so much friendlier than U-Boot! Really looking forward to the next episode.
I was working in Hong Kong Polytechnic as an Analyst Programmer II, and my first task at work was a BASIC program running on a PDP 11/73 running RSTS/E operating systems....those were the days of fun, because every BASIC pragram needs to be compiled within maximum 64K of memory...Yes, it's 64K, and we need to do page swapping !!! Modern programmers won't imagine this back into the mid 80's. Love this video, and I still missed all those VT220s, VT320s, and VT420s terminal, and they were so robust !
I did FORTRAN programming for tracing brain slice images from a stepper motor controlled microscope stage on a PDP-11/34 with 32K words running RT-11. The compile and link of a FORTRAN program of 500 or so lines could take minutes. I really liked working with the VR-17 X-Y vector display with light pen.
I also played around with BASIC on RSTS. My recollection was the BASIC interpreter was pretty true to the Dartmouth documentation for BASIC.
sweet.... we used to have a vax-station over at the AMF bowling alley i used to work at in the mid 90s. i was the only one that knew anything about it and was a cool piece of kit to play with
Great work! Thanks for sharing - I really am jealous.
Worked on PDP-11s from 23s to 73s to 83 and truly wanted a 93.. (all Q-bus) ... also worked pdp-11/40 (Unibus) too. btw did you know -- odd model number = q-bus, even = Unibus? Used RSX-11M Plus mainly with F77 (Fortran) for material handling supervisory control of PLCs. I really am jealous. Please load RSX-11 as it will allow the most functionality of the hardware and is also multi-user environment. Love to see RMD again.. resource management display -- shows what 's in memory and where in real time. Can't wait...
love your dedication but as a long time technician my first action with the power supply would be replace all the electrolytic capacitors. use the best 105c you can get.
Used this unit ( I think) in a Trace circuit board Tester. Survived Y2k !
So cool
Me shouting at the screen when the garbage appeared, “PRESS F3 FOR SETUP!” 😂
Love those VT terminals. Specially the VT220 and VT320.
Same here. Used VT terminals at the University. Later owned a pile of them which I got from an auction. Sold them with good profit.
No love for the VT240 or VT340?
Great stuff man...we are ready for the next step! Thank you for sharing this!
The good ole rifa madness...
Seeing that VT320 smooth scrolling was absolute nostalgia heaven for me.
it's wild i hadn't heard about the smooth scrolling before today. it would be the *only* thing i showed people about my cool old terminal
The smooth scrolling looks neat, but it is too slow to use for long. I had a VT100, then VT220, then VT320, then VT240 in my office. Of those, the VT220 was probably the best compromise between performance and build quality.
The way the VT terminals operate, what is to be displayed is stored as a linked list in memory. This makes it relatively quick to update a screen because a line can be easily added into or deleted from the center of the display by changing the pointers into the list. The terminal can also function as a viewport into a virtual screen larger than the physical X-Y dimensions of the terminal. The problem is that memory gets fragmented as the display updates. Every so often, the CPU has to pause to garbage collect to consolidate memory. When that happens, the terminal asserts flow control back to the host. There’re an input ring buffer in the terminal, but the buffer can overrun and wrap, losing data.
The pause key on the keyboard with also cause the CPU to immediately quit updating the display list and freeze the screen and issue flow control. Again, the input buffer may overrun if the host does not recognize flow control quickly enough and stop sending. To the terminal user, chunks of text may mysteriously go missing.
Wow! A genuine VT-320! Haven't seen one of those since the late '80s when I was attending Georgia Tech. One of the *many* computer labs on campus had a PDP-11, and the lab had about a dozen of these terminals hooked up to it. Man, that brings back some memories -- can't believe how long ago that was.
Dang, I can't believe how nice that scrolling is -at 9600baud!- I have to admit I didn't think PDP-11s were that small, I thought they were all Centurion sized or bigger. Nice to see that badass tower in action.
Scrolling does not depend on baud rate. It's handled internally on VT terminal.
There were many different sizes of PDP-11s. Everything from desktop PC size to multi-cabinet ones.
@@TheUglyGnome Thanks for correcting me. I knew better, too. Needed coffee before posting. 😴
DEC terminals used XON/XOFF flow control. So if data was coming faster than it could be displayed, the terminal would tell the computer to stop sending until it caught up.
Looks like you're off to a good start with this rig, compared to the hell you went through to get the Centurion to boot! Curious to see what all you can do with this. IMHO, I think this system is quite a bit more refined than the Centurion, just from the boot ROM display. L👀king forward to more!😉👍
I used to use PDP-11/03/04... Machine controllers used in electronic assembly machines from early universal instruments thru hole BCD assembly and rotary sequencer machines. the sequencer puts the parts in order for the VCD to place them on the PCB. Good and bad memories, mostly good as a service and programming guy
Look to see if you have RT-11; it's a single-user OS, fairly simple to boot up, and can be run off of floppies. RSX-11M is a multi-user system that requires a hard drive and a more involved system configuration ("SYSGEN").
Can the PDP-11 run X11 under 2.11BSD? That would be a cool use for the color graphics card and terminal.
It could, but I don’t know about the specific graphics board mentioned. Finding surviving software, if it ever existed, would be the hard part. What was a pretty snazzy graphics board in 1983 would be agonizingly slow now. I had a Sun 3/160 which had Sun’s advanced graphics which occupied two full VME slots connecting to a Hitachi monitor which weighed about 150 pounds, connected by three BNCs each about as thick as a pinky finger. With all that, it could take seconds to render the X version of Sunclock full screen on the X client running on top of SunOS 4.11. I don’t remember for sure, but I believe the resolution was 1152 x 900 pixels. The Sun 3 power supply was labeled “1.5 KW” and I believe the system used most of it. The Sun 3 definitely warmed up the room.
It might be fun to say you revived old hardware, but it would be agonizing to use it for much time, being accustomed to how fast PCs do work now. Even a Raspberry Pi Zero W2 beats the pants off my old Sun 3/160. I donated my Sun 3/160 to a university amateur radio club in 1993 mostly because it was too expensive to run 24x7 and it made my house hot. The club used the Sun as a packet radio Internet gateway for a number of years because the university did not charge them for the electric consumption.
Seeing how much memory X takes up, I think the best usage of the color card would be color Unicode
@@charliekahn4205 Early builds of X11 would run comfortably with 8MB of RAM, which is not outside the PDP-11's parameters. It's just the matter of _finding_ an early build.
@@ordinaryk the issue is that you'd still need room in memory for other things to run. Or a ridiculously huge swap partition.
Really excited to see your pdp11 grow! I was lucky enough to be seconded from the UK to work at Cutler Hammer, Fenton, Michigan for 3 months in 1978. My task was to develop a software program to run on a Motorola 8-bit CPU. Cutler Hammer Fenton was only a small division of the main HQ in Milwaukee and only had around 50 to 100 employees but they had a fully blown massive pdp10 mainframe system as well as at least one pdp11 and countless other smaller systems. I used the pdp11 with a cross assembler for the Motorola 6800. It was heaven for a 24 year old graduate from the UK.
Seeing you working passionately to revive these iconic DEC computers brings back many great memories of a computing era now far in the past. Please keep these videos coming.
The scrolling is beautifully smooth for an old machine.
I remember the VT320 seeming like a really nice, deluxe terminal back in the day!
Winner winner, chicken dinner! Congrats on another working legendary computer.
This totally brought me back to 1983-1987. I had no idea the last RSX-11M upgrade was 1999! Those codes you saw on the LED were the boot codes.
So the plan is to install the Matrox card and a few disks, and maybe something to connect it to a network? That would give you a very capable PDP-11 desktop system to take to exhibitions.
Oh man, a Vax or PDP-11 machine has been on my dream wishlist for years. I had a teacher who gave me a bunch of her old computer manuals and programming books to learn from when I was in high school, and the book I did the most reading in was a VAX/VMS manual. I've wanted to experience one ever since then and it's been 15-ish years.
They were built at a time when metal was no object.
I became a pdp and vax admin in my early 20s I am now 54. I loved every minute and your enthusiasm is thrilling. I remember that feeling. We had an intergraph modified pdp 11/70. One day it wouldn’t boot. We found if we thumped the 8 inch floppy it would boot. Oh happy days, it was my favourite job. It was the same place the electrician put his screw driver across a three phase supply and blew himself across the room into the pdp. He survived but was smoking.
Welcome to my world :D I first saw a uPDP boot in 1985 when I was given one at work to port our applications to MicroRSX. I still have an u11/73 and today I picked up a boxful of QBUS and UNIBUS cards from (I think) an 11/40 or 11/70. Still need to go through them. Looking forward to more PDP!
I'm 99.98% sure that smooth scrolling is configurable in the terminal (since I think I remember "my" VT220 having that toggle in the F3 menu system.
The differing sizes displayed for the two memory cards is because the top 8Kb of address space are reserved for I/O.
Smooth scrolling on the VT320 (a feature inherited from the VT100 which introduced it) works by advancing the display one scan line per frame.
I worked for GE from '83 to '89 and the terminal brings back memories. We were using the VAX series, but my senior engineer was an expert with the PDP-11.
I worked at GE Aviation around 2005.
They still had these VAX computers.
They were used for testing some Air force equipment.
To re-tool the test system with modern equipment was just too much government red tape.
I didn't appreciate what a wide range of computing power levels the PDP-11 models over the years represented until now! This machine would make an awesome UNIX system! Over the past year I have come to see the wisdom behind the development of UNIX for the sake of making a good development environment for career programmers trying to develop applications for the ever more powerful systems coming out every year. I bet a lot of the systems of this vintage became the backbone of the publishing industry for that decade.
The fact that the computer booted up with such ease after so many years really speaks to why they stayed in use for so much time!
I can't believe how far you have come since I first started following you (you were _just_ getting started on the tube computer). Your lab is starting to look pretty epic. I love the PDP/11, but I'm very excited for some 12k RPM action happening soon. *THAT* is truly rare stuff.
The (vsync matched) smooth scrolling was also used by Regnecentralen's CP/M computers and I never understood why it wasn't more widespread - even today!
smooth vsync'ed scrolling: I suspect there are simply too few people caring about this. Personally, I prefer a lightning fast terminal over a vsync'ed as the latter will always be much slower.
Those characters in the beginning of the boot are a miscalculation of the voltage that is being input into CPU. You need a lower input source perhaps.
I can totally relate to your giddy excitement when you get some old hardware to run! Something only other vintage computer nerds can relate to :D. Be EXTREMELY careful with the plastic of that old DEC hardware, especially the VT320. I have a VT520 which has been crumbling before my very eyes. Whatever injection molded plastic DEC used wasn't designed to last more than a few decades. Its at the point where its in bits and pieces now which glue cant save. I may end up making a wooden VT520 case with all the guts of the simply because its now structurally unsound. Yeah I just love the amber display of those old DEC terminals.
I worked at Digital in Canada and had a VT320 connected to a burn-in chamber running heating/cooling cycles on multiple main boards to test for thermal related faults. This was back in 1993 and the monitor and keyboard looked about as dirty as what you cleaned.
Wow, I haven’t seen a PDP-11 run or a VT terminal since around 1987. We had them in various rack mount forms running in the “Message Relay Centre” of the Australian Overseas Telecommunications Commission. Basically we took telex messages in from around the world and reformatted them for local distribution. The PDP’s were workhorses used for a bunch of different tasks with the most interesting being the support to keep a pair of Univac 418’s running. These old dinosaurs ran the production software for the entire message relay centre and were built using magnetic core memory and “Fastrand drums” for storage. The cost to replace the 418s was prohibitive and the drums were getting pretty unreliable and almost impossible to fix. They were around 12’ long and weighed a couple of tons each. The PDPs were used to emulate the drums to the Univacs and wrote out to “Modern” lol removable media disc drives….
Best part of them was that we had a tech test system that was non-production that we could learn on, and of course, it could play Zork lol.
I had to pause when I saw the Bomem INC address on the manual, that's right here in Québec city! It's like a 10min drive from my apartment, the building now houses a handful of businesses, the main one being a coffee and spice distributor. I knew we had AdLib on Grande-Allée back in the day, but I didn't know we had another computer hardware company in the city at the time! And of course Matrox was based in Montréal, but that's more widely known as they were a huge deal in the world of computer graphics
You have all this DEC equipment and you've never booted a PDP-11? Actually, you still haven't booted one, since the system told you there were no bootable devices.
Another viewer from the Houston area here. If you need vintage vacuum tubes (circa 1950s), I have a cache I inherited from my father.
Even when you booted with just 2Mb, the I/O addresses were at the top 8Kb of the 4th Mb (17757770 through 17777776). when you added the 2nd 2Mb the last 8Kb couldn't be used as it's already mapped off.
Cleaning old keyboards is a special sort of tedious that is only enjoyed by folks that find it meditative :) Related, i had found that soaking the cables for cleaning leads to a grab-bag of odd symptoms due to water getting inside the outer sheathing. Those with phone service on older copper cables have hear what water on the line sounds like! The risk is reduced by keeping the ends out of the solution but the sheathing may have tiny cracks from age. It goes extra pear-shaped if the insulation on the conductors inside has also cracked with age. My fix is to pretend the cable is a cat - sprawl it out in a nice warm sun beam for a couple days.
moar PDP stuff? Yes, please!! ^_^ (and wow, that was really a smooth scrolling!)
You've been working on some real museum pieces lately. I love it. This old equipment is endlessly fascinating.
I've only seen one running PDP-11 that I can recall and that was in the mid-1990s at the aircraft plant where my father worked. It was connected to a power analysis system mounted to a large cart.
I've seen none running despite owning about 3-4 at this stage...
This makes me miss my old PDT-11/150... dual 8" floppys with RT-11...
Nostalgia - I used PDP-11's at university - mostly with VT220 terminals ... the VT320's were always the classy ones ...
I am just amazed about that clear smoothly scroll! The good old days of amber screens ahhhh!!
I have "SYS-GENED" (generated a system operating system) and booted a PDP-11. When they were the latest.
I have also used those removable disk drives on the shelf.
I love the PSU design. The smooth scroll is impressive.
As a data entry operator at a multisite medical lab back in 1987, I kept the smooth scrolling off as it was so slow it didn't keep up with the fields being entered. Seeing that again triggered that irritation, lol. Nightly tape backups on the vaxes. And nightly hard copy dumps on dot matrix printers that always jammed. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Those VT320s are lovely and compact but I always feel "for authenticity" you "need" a VT100.
I used to have a mono VGA monitor that I'm sure was more or less identical to that VT320........ Didn't DEC make some PCs in later years.
From what I can tell the 11/83 was released in 1988, a bit after the VT320.
I imagine this machine coming up asking "Where am I and what year is it?"
You have inspired me. I have many hours using older systems. So what I decided to try is to make a 'sleeper' version of some older x86 Sun gear that I am used to working on. I basically keep the case and install much newer hardware. Then I can run a bunch of VMs. Waiting on parts still. Fingers crossed that I can cram it all in there. But I am all excited to try it.
Thanks for the reminder, I’d almost forgotten Sun dabbled in X86 hardware for a while. I ran Solaris 86 on a generic Pentium-90 PC at home running NCSA’s web server for a while with an Internet connection over a 256Kbit ISDN connection. Installing Sun packages was a pain in the neck and fighting off Russian hackers trying to break in was pretty much a continuous thing. Those were the days.
Update: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 32 threads, 128Gb RAM. Up and running. It is very fast and easily runs multiple VMs.
I repaired those PDPs and VAXes for years. I did exactly what you did... but I also replaced all capacitors.
For the terminal, the smooth scroll can be changed in the settings (smooth slow, fast or jump). Don't forget to save the new settings. Otherwise the terminal will load the old settings after a power cycle. To do a "load defaults" would also be a good idea since you don't know what the former owner did. (And save again)
For the memories, you need to check if the DIP switch settings are correct. There is a starting address for each memory board. The first goes from zero to 2048kB and the second starts at 2048 and goes to 4096kB. If those switches are not set correctly, you get an overlap of the two ranges. That could be the reason for the "2040kB" display.
Congratulations on getting your machine running!!!
At Mostek we used RSX-11D on our PDP11/70, and an 11/34. We connected the two with DECnet, it was my job to get that up and running. The link ran between buildings that were about a quarter mile apart. I felt so accomplished when I got the link up. I wrote an application for the 11/34 in MACRO-11 that could buffer data using linked lists which managed data flow between the two systems. I modeled it after a linked list program I’d written in Pascal. When you’re used to programming in Assembler, it’s a snap to understand list pointers. The application would transparently pass data unless the link went down, then it would buffer it to disk until the link came back up. It also cached testing programs sent down, in case a test system needed one when the link was down. I was pretty proud of that program despite not being a formally trained programmer. Hell, back then, no one was formally trained. We just read books and manuals until we understood what we were doing. I’m a hardware and software engineer, which gave me a huge advantage over both camps back then.
Thanks for the reminder. DECnet was kind of funky over Ethernet because it would change the MAC address from the BIA on the interface. We had a few Vaxes running Berkeley UNIX, one running Ultrix and several VMS machines. UNIX and Ultrix supported TCP/IP natively, but we had to run and add-on 3rd party TCP/IP suite on VMS until DEC thankfully natively supported TCP/IP on VMS. We used 3Com terminal servers to connect several hundred terminals over Ethernet back to the Vaxes. Well heeled labs had PCs with Ethernet cards talking directly to the minicomputers in the machine room. I liked administering UNIX a lot better thanks to more terse interaction with the O/S. VMS was quite similar to TOPS-20 I’d first used in the 1970s and, shall we say, rather chatty. I’m reminded of VMS now by the rather verbose commands in Windows PowerShell required for doing Wizard level work in Active Directory.
@@wtmayhew, We didn't have Ethernet back in the 70's, just wires, plain old wires.
@@yonaguska2050 We looked at quite a few nascent network technologies in the early 1980s: Banyan Vines, DECnet, Token Ring, Apple LocalTalk, ARCnet. Those are ones I remember off the cuff, there were probably others as well. I read William Stallings classic series of networking books and made the case for TCP/IP over 10base5 thick cable. We installed our first segment in the summer of 1983, pulling 1600 feet of triple shielded plenum rated cable in one piece. That was a lot of physical work! Before that time, we used muxes from Black Box to combine 8 serial lines at time from our machine room to office areas. The Ethernet replaced the muxes with Bridge terminal servers (later to be absorbed into 3Com) which had 14 serial ports to open telnet sessions back to the hosts. Then Bridge units had a 68000 CPU and proprietary operating environment (it wasn’t really a full O/S) which booted from a 5.25 inch floppy.
I actually did have one tiny ARCnet which only connected one management PC to a Multitech modem bank. We also later ran Novell IPX/SPX over Ethernet simultaneously with TCP/IP. PCs eventually got network cards and terminal servers were gradually retired in areas no longer needing them. PCs had mostly 3Com cards of several types which were supported by Clarkson packet drivers allowing the NetWare stack and TCP/IP stack to coexist in MS-DOS. MacIntosh was a little more difficult to support. Asante made pretty decent cards for Mac IIs and the like which had VME(?) slots, but those cards were TCP/IP. Running TCP/IP natively on NetWare wasn’t really good until 4.1 and we transitioned from NetWare to Windows NT for file services by then.
Absolute unit! Would love to see Unix / Zork! haha
Congratulations ! But I remember that VT320 smooth scroll got really old, really quickly. Not sure why, but I much preferred the normal scrolling.
Same here. First time I saw it, it was like WOW! Second time it was like: hit F3 as fast as possible and turn it off.
Others here made the same comment. I seem to vaguely recall a similar preference, but I can't vouch for my poor memory.
4 MB? That's downright spacious compared to the 16KB pdp-comaptible system I've been messing with! :P
If I saw that scroll in a movie, I'd laugh and say how fake that is. But... I'd be totally and shamefully wrong. 🤣 Let me know when you get Doom running on it! This excitement is infectious. Great video!
Back in the late 80's using a terminal like that for my Fortran 77 class that smooth scrolling seemed so so sssssmmmmmooooootttttthhhhh! Ain't nothing like sharing your VAX 11/780 with a few hundred of your fellow classmates. But hey, I was living in poverty and using a 32 bit computer.
Brings back some very old memories, over 30 years ago I was PDP engineer - I used to work onsite travelling around customers, fixing down to component level with circuit diagrams, especially on PDP11/70's and all of the peripherals attached.
Thank you
The PDP-11 has memory mapped I/O in the top of the 4MB address space, so that (small) portion of RAM will always be obscured by the I/O page and unavailable.
This brings back memories of me learning to program in COBOL on an already 18 year old vax VMS system in the 90's. We used a very similar keyboard/monitor setup. It had better version control built in than Windows and Linux, and Mac OS have today. I'm now a software developer. I'm a huge DEC fan!
That butter-smooth scrolling reminds me of the Visual 200 terminals that the University of Canterbury had when I was an undergrad in the 1980s. I thought they were utterly cool at the time!
Nice to see the machine start up with no problems. You are going to have lots of fun with all those PDP-11 items. I've always liked the smooth scrolling on those old terminals.
First thing I used to turn off.. Life is to short lol
Make sure you get that Bomem manual over to bitsavers!
Again a super video!!! But... how is your cat??? I hope good again. Greetings from Germany. Best, Erik
Came for the PDP, stayed for the enthusiasm.
Note: all of the map address numbers are in OCTAL, not decimal, or Hex. But you probably already knew that... :)
That smooth scroll. Better than what we get today.
Yo if you want to get rid of yellowing on beige plastic, make a hydrogen peroxide + gum Arabic paste... brush it on, wrap in 'saran wrap', and leave in the sun or under UV light.
Back in the day if you had a drive that wasn't used for a while it was a good idea to 'refresh' them. By reading and rewriting every sector to bring the magnetics back up to snuff. I don't know the utility program for pdp 11 (or if it evens needs such a thing) but given how old the drives are you may want to do that sooner rather then later.
You can toggle Smooth Scroll on/off in the setup. Personally, I hated smooth scroll, as it felt slow.
there is something about seeing old tech that is great
Amber monochrome.....ohhhhhh, that takes me back.
A hard reset after changing baud rate would have helped, surely?