Post by Tom LakeI just bought a PRO 350 with P/OS on the HD but no system diskettes.
Does anyone know where I could get a complete set of system disks
for this unit? I'm willing to buy them if necessary. Is it possible to
create
a bootable disk from the HD files?
Also, I found an FTP site with a lot of disk images (.dsk and .td0 files)
How can I get those from my Win XP PC to my 350 so I can use them?
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/pro/
Thanks for any info you might have for a DEC NooB.
Tom Lake
The pro 350 was dec's pdp-11 personal computer. I have one in non-booting condition (at least from the hard drive), along with developer's toolkit, system disks (not necessarily readable), and a few applications. The university bought a bunch of them for the professors to use. I think I installed most of them.
Not quite sure *WHY* you want a pro 350, but I might still be able to talk about them a little. There was a *BIG* difference between a PDP-11 running RSX-11 or RSTS and a pro-350. They were intended for entirely different markets. Add the developers toolkit and suddenly you have a pdp-11/23 running
rsx-11. DEC made *GREAT* equipment, from the perspective of the user--just not the pro-350.
The pdp-11 was a scientific and business market computer and the pro-350 was an attempt to put the minicomputer on a desk. It just needed a manager.
Back in the day, all of dec's software installation was automated. Third party developers did what they did, but i think dec did things well. Don't quite remember the process, but whatever it was was straightforward. The pro 350 ran everything under menus. The toolkit gave you the rsx prompt. I think I have full documentation--the toolkit documentation might be 3-4 feet long, or something like that. The operating system and applications came in pretty little boxes the size of a copy of "War and Peace" or something like that.
The machine required specially formatted 5.25 inch disks. You could buy them from dec or format them yourself on a rainbow-100, i think. It was a dec manufactured ibm-pc compatible. Never knew a way to format them on the pro 350.
Programming in the toolkit, you were limited to the pdp-11 64k address space, but from macro the operating system had good support for overlays. You could remap the 64k address space into the larger physical address space in 8k blocks called apr's. In addition, the operating system supported overlays and a careful programmer could swap data files to contiguous files on disk. I wrote a distillation model that way around 1990.
My dad's house is getting cleaned out and not quite sure what the future of this stuff is. Probably not good. There is a pro-350, letterprinter 100 (dot matrix serial printer--letter quality was less than a daisy wheel), and a few applications and modems. Then we got interested in macs.