Various kinds of System reloads 2354

A sysgen is a build, not an installation. The output of a sysgen is an executable that then can be booted up and run. IBM was unique in doing this generating task at one the steps at boot time. That is when it took more than a few minutes to bring a system up for general use.

At DEC a sysgen and a build of a system disk were two separate processes that were never tied together. This gave each and every site broad flexibility of what they ran, when they ran, how they ran. If something went wrong, the operator just typed in the old monitor's filename at boot time. One did not have to remove the system pack and replace it with the old system disk pack.

Nope. Not with TOPS-10. EVery customer had to build his own flavor of monitor. The same was true for a -20 only they got *.RELs instead of sources. In the beginning a -20 could run an OS exe right off the tape because it was new and didn't have a history of having to support old gear and old software monitor calls.

Sigh! Or site specific hardware. There was a lot of hardware DEC never shipped but customers bought. C'mon, Lars. You know better than this. Most PDP-11 customers had their own home-build code that ran in those systems. It was the main reason they bought that hardware.

No, they couldn't. There wasn't enough memory nor money to buy memory to be that dynamic.

No. If anything these systems were more complex in that each and every owner of those systems had to know his hard-software inside out in the most intimate detail. This can be a feature or it can be a curse. Those who had a need for a stable system that stayed up forever bought IBM because IBM had exclusive control of what code and what gear was in each and every system.

BAH