[Simh] VAX 730 Console Tapes [was: VAX 8200]

Johnny Billquist bqt at softjar.se
Thu Mar 16 21:01:51 EDT 2017


On 2017-03-16 23:01, Hittner, David T [US] (MS) wrote:
>> What I started with, though, was managing 11/730s in the mid-80s and was optimizing the order of files on the console tape to be in the order they were requested, so a 30-minute boot process fell to under 5 minutes... nearly all the time spent was doing serial transfers with far, far less tape motion.  -ethan
>
> What always surprised me was that Digital provided VAX 730/750 Console tapes "Out Of Order" (alphabetically) which caused slow cold boot times, and YOU had to create an optimized version of the tape if you wanted a faster boot time. And as Ethan said it really made a difference in the cold boot time.
>
> .. What a pain that was. I guess they never cold-booted the internal development console-tape systems enough to get annoyed enough to optimize the tapes for the customers. I spent a lot of time making boot-optimized console tapes also.

My only comment is that I normally never booted from the TU58. Why would 
you do that, except at initial install, or to run diagnostics.

	Johnny

-- 
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


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