[HN Gopher] More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO...
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       More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)
        
       Author : classichasclass
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2025-03-16 02:31 UTC (20 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
        
       | bediger4000 wrote:
       | This is an enormous article, filled with everything - DEC
       | history, ads from period IT mags, pictures of fabled hardware,
       | reminiscing, hardware restoration.
        
         | Locutus_ wrote:
         | Great read, but I honestly had wished the author had split it
         | into several separate articles.
        
       | zdw wrote:
       | The ascii art partway through the article is extremely endearing:
       | % cat /thankyou                THANK YOU FOR RESCUING ME
       | ******             *      *            *  *  *  *            *
       | *            *  *  *  *            *  *  *  *            *   **
       | *             *      *              ******
        
       | zabzonk wrote:
       | When I worked at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, UK in the
       | mid 1980s DEC actually gifted us with three of these things (we
       | were a big DEC customer - Dec10 and several VAXen). We really had
       | no idea what to do with them as they came with no useful software
       | - as I remember only the OS (RTX of some sort, I think) and a
       | rather good Lunar Lander game. They were also terribly unreliable
       | - the internal bus was very flaky. We accidentally fixed this by
       | carrying them in the back of a van between Poly sites - the
       | vibration re-seated things, and later worked out that lifting
       | them a few inches and then dropping them did the same.
       | 
       | I also had a DEC Rainbow, which made a very nice VT200 terminal,
       | but was otherwise nearly as useless. I did actually write some
       | software for it to support the Polys student application clearing
       | service, which made use of an 8mb hard drive that came packed in
       | a crate about as large as a dishwasher.
       | 
       | I was so happy when the first IBM XT arrived.
       | 
       | PS Good article!
        
         | classichasclass wrote:
         | (author) Thank you! Was it because the cards fit badly on the
         | CTI card edges or something else? These cards seem to be in
         | pretty good. Doesn't look like Caltech did much with this one
         | either. I need to get the other out and image its disk too.
        
           | zabzonk wrote:
           | We never identified the root cause of the problem. As we
           | couldn't really do anything very useful with them, there was
           | not much incentive.
        
       | dboreham wrote:
       | A testament to the lack of success of this machine is that as a
       | 50 year pdp-11 aficionado with a collection of machines from this
       | period, I'd never heard of it until now! I knew about the Rainbow
       | of course, and the pdp-8 based desk machines, but no clue this
       | thing existed.
        
         | flyinghamster wrote:
         | In an alternate universe, DEC could have owned personal
         | computing outright and caught IBM flat-footed. But they were
         | deathly afraid of cannibalizing their minicomputer business, so
         | the only home -11s that made it out the door without being
         | hobbled were the Heathkits (H11 and H11A), and even those were
         | sort-of hobbled in that they could only use 16-bit Q-bus cards
         | unless you were willing to do some hardware hacking, even to
         | the point of cutting a hole in the case. Otherwise, they were
         | legit Q-bus LSI-11s that could run standard DEC operating
         | systems, and V7 Unix as well (but not 2BSD due to memory
         | constraints).
         | 
         | If you want to play around with an emulated Pro/350, there's an
         | emulator and images here:
         | https://xhomer.isani.org/xhomer/xhomer.html
         | 
         | There are images for P/OS, Venix, 2.9BSD, and RT-11 5.3.
        
       | rasz wrote:
       | > We simply can't seem to beat the Pro's firmware to come up
       | first before the Pro concludes no hard disk is present.
       | 
       | >charge the capacitors (very fast) and start bringing up the BBG
       | while the Pro's initial boot fails. With our new shortened boot
       | time the BBG will be ready and waiting by the time the Pro
       | displays its error screen. We then power the Pro off and power it
       | back on. As long as the power cycle is less than 20 seconds (I
       | eventually upped this to 30 as there appears to be plenty of
       | power available), the BBG will ride the stored charge and keep
       | serving the emulated disk image so that on that second power-on
       | (and every power-on thereafter) the Pro will see the drive and
       | boot from it.
       | 
       | eeew. Next time you are faced with such problem make your slow
       | booting disk emulator control Reset signal of the main computer.
       | Keep it in reset until emulator is ready.
        
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       (page generated 2025-03-16 23:02 UTC)