creat 1199

11-M was Dave Cutler's answer to 11-D running away with memory. It was superficially similar on the outside. Inside, the I-O and the dispatcher were totally different. 11-M's I-O was Cutler at his early best. I used to think I could program till I saw that stuff. Afterwards I nicked his ideas all over the place. 11-D and especially IAS had a far better interface for timesharing use. 11-M's MCR 11-S *was* 11-M. It was a sysgen time decision. It was 11-M designed to run diskless, with all the tasks installed and scheduled by a thing called VMR before the O-S booted (over simplified description) That would be the vile DEC-tape-II (TU58). Not to be confused with DEC-tape (TC05) It was common practice to use it as a boot medium on the very cheapest systems. You were very lucky to get away with that. RSTS modem control code was seriously sucky. The interrupts on status change went to the wrong side of the TT driver. I spent weeks fixing that for a Calcomp 960 plotter that waved CTS about. It was my first contracting job after I left DEC. Luckily, it was just before Christmas, and my debug output came in handy as wrapping paper. That 9v battery of yours sounds like a workaround for a similar problem.

Again you were lucky. RSTS was starting to crumble under its own bloat with all those run-time bags on the side. Basic+2 was the beginning of the end. No, it was a Unibus machine, one rung down from the 70 after the 11-45 range was obsolete. It was contemporary with the 11-23 and 73. It was built for folk with existing Unibus peripherals and more money than sense. I was making good money at the time getting big disks, tapes and stuff running on the Q-bus machines with third party controller hardware.

-- I thought I would be the last on earth to mung my e-mail address. fsnospam$elliott$$