On Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 9:57 AM Eric Christopherson <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 9:09 PM Ethan Dicks via cctalk > <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 8:47 PM Cameron Kaiser via cctalk >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> > > Interesting. I have VENIX on a Professional 350 (it was one of the >> > > machines I had on display for VCF East). I haven't tried fiddling >> > > with VENIX on a Rainbow, though I did know it existed. >> > >> > Venix/PRO on a 380 here. I like it. Thinking about ways to make it >> > primitively networked. > > I'm really glad to see this discussion; I have a PDP-11/23+ waiting to be > poked at, but didn't know about the Professional at all; it's interesting to > see that Venix can run on the /23+ as well.
Venix/Pro has a driver for the Pro RD50 disk controller. This is not an MSCP controller, it's its own thing and fairly low-level (the driver has to know details about how drives work, not a pile of data blocks). One could probably write an MSCP driver for a Qbus machine but you'd probably want a source kit to get the Venix side of things. There _are_ versions of UNIX that will run on the 11/23. Your biggest challenge is using nothing newer than 2.9BSD (because the KDF11 lacks Split I&D) and finding a combination of disk controllers and OS support that match up (there are patches for 2.9BSD that back-port an MSCP driver for the RQDX3 but I haven't personally played with them - my 2.9BSD work was on Unibus, on an 11/24 with either RL11/RL02 or RK611/RK07 drives). If you have an RLV11 or RLV12 and 1-2 RL02 drives, that's a good starting point for UNIX on an 11/23. If all you have for disk is something on an RQDX3, you might be limited to patched 2.9BSD. > Whether it's a good choice of OS (compared to, say, 2.9BSD) or not I don't > know. The version on my machine (Venix/PRO v1) is largely a port of UNIX v7. I think Venix/PRO v2 for the Pro 380 is something different (and newer) under the hood, to support Split I&D for example. Not sure about MSCP or network drivers there though. It was definitely interesting writing code on my Venix box at VCF East - turns out it has a minor Y2K problem. Internal date representation is seconds-since-the-epoch, of course, but the date command itself only allows 2-digit year. You can set the time to 23:59:00 31-Dec-99 and let it roll over then repeat each year until you get to the current one... which could be done by a shell script, of course, or, what I did was to write a simple program to accept the current time in seconds and feed that to stime. Nearly all my experience is with later (post-1984) versions of UNIX so I had a bit of learning to do (or is that learning to forget?) to get things working there but I did. I wish I'd packed my 1975 pocket flip-guide, but at least I had all the original paper Venix/Pro docs (also up on Bitsavers). -ethan -ethan
