peclark
Member
I recently completed some long overdue upgrades to my Micro-PDP11/23, and thought I would share them here.
I got this machine about 20 years ago from the building manager of a building I used to work in. She was happy to have someone get it out of her office, and I gladly took it! It had run the card entry system for the building for many years, and I think by 2004 when I got it, it had been retired for a number of years.
When I got it, it had:
KDF11-BJ - MicroPDP-11/23 ROM v1.1
M8639 RQDX1 with MFM hard disk and RX50 Floppies
M7957x2 - DZV11 Asynchronous Multiplexer - Serial ports communicated with the card readers
M8067 MSV11-P 256K Word Memory Card
According to the engineers spec sheet who spec'd the system, it also had a VT100 terminal (which unfortunately was long gone when I got the machine), a Hayes Chronograph (which I did get) for a clock.
According to some of the documentation, it ran some software called Sensornet - which I have the manual to in case any is interested, I could try to scan it. It looks like it was perhaps a Schlage Electronics company/offering.
At some point, part of Sprint occupied this building, and there was a blank parking sign-up form which I thought was cool.
Here's some info on how the system was configured.
The MFM hard disk worked ok, and I was able to make a backup image using David Gesswein's MFM emulator, but the OS was kinda corrupt.. I'm not sure if someone had played around with the machine after it was taken out of commission or if the drive had some issues on it. Either way, my plan was to run Ultrix on it.
I decided to replace the hard disk with a ZuluSCSI emulator, and added an Emulex UC07 to control it. I also upgraded the CPU to an M8190-AE (11/83), and am using a QBone for 4MB of memory, and added a DELQA ethernet card. I installed Ultrix-11 3.1 using a tape image in SIMH and then transferred the Simh virtual disk images over to an SD card used with the Zulu. I did have some trouble with the partition handling between the way Simh supported devices (RQDX3), and the "Real" PDP11 (KDA50), but I was able to work around these, essentially using 4 disk images (RA81) (4 scsi ids) and using partition 7 (which uses the whole disk). 1 Disk for /bin, 1 for USR, and 2 for user file systems.
Here's the ZuluSCSI mounted in the hard disk bay. Hot glue and the original hard disk mounting bracket was my friend.
I ran the SCSI cable through an opening in the back of the hard disk bay that had a metal cover that was adjustable - into the card cage area and to the UC07.
I also replaced the fans and documented that in a separate post here New fans for my Micro PDP11/23
I got this machine about 20 years ago from the building manager of a building I used to work in. She was happy to have someone get it out of her office, and I gladly took it! It had run the card entry system for the building for many years, and I think by 2004 when I got it, it had been retired for a number of years.
When I got it, it had:
KDF11-BJ - MicroPDP-11/23 ROM v1.1
M8639 RQDX1 with MFM hard disk and RX50 Floppies
M7957x2 - DZV11 Asynchronous Multiplexer - Serial ports communicated with the card readers
M8067 MSV11-P 256K Word Memory Card
According to the engineers spec sheet who spec'd the system, it also had a VT100 terminal (which unfortunately was long gone when I got the machine), a Hayes Chronograph (which I did get) for a clock.
According to some of the documentation, it ran some software called Sensornet - which I have the manual to in case any is interested, I could try to scan it. It looks like it was perhaps a Schlage Electronics company/offering.
At some point, part of Sprint occupied this building, and there was a blank parking sign-up form which I thought was cool.
Here's some info on how the system was configured.
The MFM hard disk worked ok, and I was able to make a backup image using David Gesswein's MFM emulator, but the OS was kinda corrupt.. I'm not sure if someone had played around with the machine after it was taken out of commission or if the drive had some issues on it. Either way, my plan was to run Ultrix on it.
I decided to replace the hard disk with a ZuluSCSI emulator, and added an Emulex UC07 to control it. I also upgraded the CPU to an M8190-AE (11/83), and am using a QBone for 4MB of memory, and added a DELQA ethernet card. I installed Ultrix-11 3.1 using a tape image in SIMH and then transferred the Simh virtual disk images over to an SD card used with the Zulu. I did have some trouble with the partition handling between the way Simh supported devices (RQDX3), and the "Real" PDP11 (KDA50), but I was able to work around these, essentially using 4 disk images (RA81) (4 scsi ids) and using partition 7 (which uses the whole disk). 1 Disk for /bin, 1 for USR, and 2 for user file systems.
Here's the ZuluSCSI mounted in the hard disk bay. Hot glue and the original hard disk mounting bracket was my friend.
I ran the SCSI cable through an opening in the back of the hard disk bay that had a metal cover that was adjustable - into the card cage area and to the UC07.
I also replaced the fans and documented that in a separate post here New fans for my Micro PDP11/23
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