On Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 12:42 PM Henry Bent via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 at 13:06, Henry Bent <henry.r.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 at 12:59, Ethan Dicks via cctalk < > > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > > >> > >> > From: http://www.chdickman.com/pdp11/pro380.txt > >> > > >> > "The RX50 floppy starts at track 1. Track 0 is logically placed after > >> > track 79. The sectors are interleaved 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, > >> > 10. The track shift and interleave must be taken into account when > >> > moving disks between real PDP-11 and emulators." > >> > >> I have had good luck with a secfor convolver from the same page as this > >> comment: > >> > >> http://www.chdickman.com/pdp11/lbn2rx50.c > >> > >> It will go both ways, to and from physical block order and logical block > >> order. > >> > > > > That seems to have worked perfectly. Thank you for the utility and the > > explanation. Now off to working on the next steps! > > > > -Henry > > > > A brief follow-up on this: After lots of (virtual) disk-swapping I was able > to upgrade an existing 1.0 system but was not able to install a 1.2 system > from scratch. It seems that there is some sort of bootloader issue with a > clean install, which I suspect might be a SIMH problem and I will follow up > there after some more investigation. > > I truly feel for the folks who had to do this at the time, using 38 > floppies on a MicroVAX I. The installer does give time estimates for > certain milestones so that you could go and get a coffee or whatever. > "Configuring vmunix, this takes about 30 minutes" is certainly indicative > of the relative speed of the machine at the time. Also there is an > indication that there was a tape distribution but so far that has not > surfaced. I'm not even sure what medium that would have been - RC25? > Doing a VMS install, twice, on a microvax ii is what convinced the powers that be to get a tk50... and an eagle 400mb drive... or at least put them over the edge to proposing work that got the upgrade funded... iirc... The VMS install was on a crazy number of floppies, if you counted all the layered products and third party packages... Warner >
