So you want to play Adventure, but don’t know how to turn on the PDP-11? These instructions are for booting our dual rack machine from its RL01 drives, although booting the single cabinet machine from the RK05 is very similar.
Detailed instructions for booting a PDP-11, including lots and lots of photos.
That was amazingly cool! I’d love to see a similar photo essay of a VAX 11/780 being booted. If I recall correctly they had a special separate microprocessor connected to a serial terminal to perform a bootstrap from an 8″ floppy drive.
We had VAX machines at De La Salle University Manila’s College of Computer Science, but I only ever accessed them by terminal. Never saw them up close.
I did an interview with a person who sells kits to recreate the pdp-11.
Interview is here:
https://www.livinginthefuture.rocks/e/episode-4-historical-computer-emulators/
His webpage is here:
https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11
Not every PDP-11 is so hard to boot up. In later machines, a lot of this is handled by a simple POST and various boot ROMs, which select what device to try to boot from and load the bootstrap code. This is the case with most QBUS systems. For a system like a PDP-11/23, it’s generally as simple as “flip the power switch and wait.”
The UNIBUS systems tended to be more hands-on, especially the earlier toggle-switch machines (like what the PiDP-11 is based on). Some of the later UNIBUS machines were also much more “turn-key”, but this didn’t seem to propagate as thoroughly as it did with the QBUS systems.
I started my career working on 11/70’s and 11/35’s, and even owned an 11/40 and an 11/20 for awhile.
They were amazing machines to work with, especially under one of the better OS’s like RSTS/E and RSX-11m.
Most of my day was in DEC BASIC+2 or VAX BASIC (later), but I did cut my teeth on ADVENT on these machines.