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

[Henry Bent]

On 10 October 2016 at 10:21, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> Back to the question, the  4.1BSD release does support the 750 and
> probably ran on more 750's then anything else but that may have been a
> patch after the original release (I'd have to check my tapes).  We did have
> a lot of them at BSD and one -- thing the 750 has was a funky tape drive
> that replaces the 780's floppies. I do remember work went into getting the
> standalone system to deal with that tape system.   Stretching my memory a
> bit, the 730 may have used that same front end.  But I think it was
> similar, although slightly different so there were changes needed for that
> also.
>
> I've forgotten now, Horton or Armando might remember better than I did,
> but 4.1BSD >> might have later<< supported the 730 "out of the box"; but I
> do not think so.  Again - that would have been a much later tape and much
> more likely a patch available on the BSD ftp site if it was available.
> Frankly, I do not remember anyone that ran BSD on a 730 (I do not even
> remember any of them at UCB but their could have been - I remember lots of
> 780s and 750s).   Basically, by the time DEC released 730 the 68K based
> systems had already been available for about 2-3 years from the Masscomp,
> Apollo, and eventually Sun.   Those systems were faster and significantly
> cheaper, hence the start of the UNIX migration to same.
>

 The 4.1BSD directory on the CSRG CD-ROM doesn't have any references to the
750 anywhere in /usr/src (or /usr for that matter).  Those files are mostly
dated November 1980.  The /4.0.upgrade/sys directory does have support for
the 750 and 730 (called "7ZZ"); those files are dated 1981 and early 1982.
So it appears that the initial release of 4.1BSD did not support the 750,
but a later patch did.

-Henry
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