[Simh] Older Model VAX simulators, what can you do with them and how do they work?

[Johnny Billquist]

Oh, and another comment. More general, but anyway...

DEC did not really expect that tapes would be booted from on VAXen, so 
they did not provide any standard way to boot in this way. For the 
VAX-11/780 for example, if you got VMS on tape, you were expected to 
boot a small standalone version of BACKUP from floppies, and then do the 
restore of the tape from this environment.

The VAX-11/750 had a similar thing with the standalong backup 
environment on DECtape II.

However, MicroVAXen reintroduced booting from tape, as the TK50 became 
widespread, and the only removable storage on many of those machines. (I 
say reintroduced, since PDP-11s usually always included the ability to 
boot from tape.)

So the approach of not being able to boot from tape, that DEC decided on 
for the early VAXen, is a bit unfortunate, since it does make these kind 
of things extra hard, if you are not using VMS.

And this is why doc sets like MtXinu provided this information in their 
manuals, and why the instructions consist of writing actual code into 
memory to do the booting from tape.
And not only did they provide the instructions for how to do this for 
the different models, they also had the different bootstraps for each 
model, for each type of device. So you had the TU80 bootstrap for the 
different models, the TM03 massbus bootstrap, the TM78 massbus 
bootstrap, and I can't remember if the TMSCP bootstrap was also provided.

But I only ever saw this in the MtXinu manuals, but I also didn't search 
anywhere else, as we had a VAX-11/750 back then, running MtXinu. So we 
had those manuals.

But any other "odd" OS for those machines would have to had provided the 
same information, if they could be booted from tape.

	Johnny

On 2016-10-10 01:46, Ray Jewhurst wrote:
> Thank you Johnny. I will look for those documents. To be honest I knew
> that the lines of hex were instructions of course but I honestly didn't
> know what they were for. I only have tape experience on a then new HP/UX
> server and that was over 20 years ago. I would like to thank all of for
> your advice and I am definitely putting getting this to work on my short
> list.
> Thank you
> Ray
>
>
> On Oct 9, 2016 7:35 PM, "Johnny Billquist" <bqt at softjar.se
> <mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:
>
>     Uh... The bootstrap listed there is for the 11/780. It does not work
>     for any other model (the 11/785 is just a faster 11/780).
>
>     The MtXinu manuals (do anyone have them around) had the bootstraps
>     for tape on all the old VAXen (11/780, 11/750, 11/730 and 8600).
>
>             Johnny
>
>     On 2016-10-09 16:40, Ray Jewhurst wrote:
>
>         Hello everyone,
>
>         I have use the VAX 11/780-5 simulator for quite some time now
>         and feel
>         pretty comfortable with them so I thought I would play around
>         with the
>         other pre-MicroVAX simulators and have had no luck with them.  I
>         tried
>         using the "recipes: from gunkies.org <http://gunkies.org>
>         <http://gunkies.org> to set up some
>         configurations and nothing works.  (I know the 11/730 has some
>         hardware
>         differences, so that one is the least of my concerns.)
>         Attempting to
>         install 3BSD onto the 11/750 gives me a "0000010 HALT" and with
>         the 8600
>         I can get all the way to the initial boot and I get a kernel
>         panic.  Now
>         I will admit I haven't tried different deposits and frankly I don't
>         understand very well how they work but I would really like to "try"
>         these machines. Also on a similar note I think that we should either
>         help to revive gunkies.org <http://gunkies.org>
>         <http://gunkies.org> or find a new place to
>         share our system "recipes" and configurations.  For example, in
>         the text
>         file that comes with DOS-11 there  are instructions that don't
>         apply to
>         that version of DOS and I would love to share a revised version
>         of said
>         instructions.
>
>         Thanks,
>         Ray
>
>
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>     --
>     Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                       ||  on a psychedelic trip
>     email: bqt at softjar.se <mailto:bqt at softjar.se>             ||
>     Reading murder books
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-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol