Booting RSTS on the PDP-11/83!

The universe is interesting. Sometimes, it just knows when you need a win, and it tosses you a softball. The little Hard Drive that came with the 11/83 originally should have an OS on it, so let’s plug it in and see what happens! Of course, the episode isn’t without its perils, but interestingly, they’re not related to the Hard Drive at all. So come along as I delve into a world I’ve never set foot in before!
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Intro Music adapted from:
Artist: The Runaway Five
Title: The Shinra Shuffle
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Thanks for watching!
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:59 Send it
3:26 Whoa, it actually worked!
4:48 Time for that curveball
5:45 Status report
7:38 Repairing the VT-320
10:19 Alright, let’s try this one more time
12:20 Hmm, it froze, let’s try again
15:54 I don’t know how to use RSTS…
17:41 Bunny!

[@TomFynn]

"we start this episode with some actually functioning equipment" You mad, daring fool, you.

[@UsagiElectric]

Really stepping out of my comfort zone there!

[@greatquux]

Doesn’t stay that way for long! 😂

[@Rfc1394]

The "Bye" prompt means this terminal is not logged in. It's waiting for you to type *hello* and press enter. KB0: is a special terminal on RSTS; it is the master console. A possible reason you don't see any characters is it's in 'half duplex' mode. In full duplex mode , when you type in a character the computer echoes it back. In half duplex, the computer does not echo. This was important on printing terminals to prevent double letter display.

[@Shiunbird]

OMG the smooth scrolling terminal output is a thing of beauty, really.

[@RingingResonance]

It really is! I'm in the process of restoring an older terminal that has this same feature. Seeing it in person was amazing the first time I saw it.

[@Shiunbird]

@@RingingResonance I have the feeling that it somehow keeps you grounded as you work, not letting your brain overheat.

[@RingingResonance]

@@Shiunbird it's very pleasing to the eye.

[@andrez76]

Right?!

[@cpcnw]

See my comment above :)

[@kanalnamn]

"SO MUCH HAPPENING... AND I DON'T UNDERSTAND A SINGLE BIT OF IT! THIS IS AWESOME!" - wonderful. I really like the same feeling, as long as it's not under time constraints on a job.

[@foobar879]

I often get this feeling when I run some code I wrote ^^

[@UsagiElectric]

It was super exciting to see it doing stuff, but I truly didn't have a clue what was going on!

[@explosivehotdogs]

I feel this way every time I watch my Apple machines boot to OSX or macos in verbose mode 😄

[@user-pd4gd7eb3w]

Used to use a PDP 11/34 at work. RSTS was always pronounced "rist us". There should be a RSTS manual on the disk. also look for a program called PIP. As for a login/account try 1:99 password 'DEC' . This was a back door for DEC technicians to do system maintenance on all PDPs I worked on.

[@SuperDave1426]

I hear ya - every time he pronounced RSTS as individual letters, I kept saying "ristus!" Like he could hear me. 😋

[@dcmoisan]

Longtime RSTS expert here. Try "HELLO 1,2, password SYSTEM. Also, don't start timesharing right away; the RSTS bootloader has options for refreshing the disk and disabling hardware.

[@AureliusR]

I always heard that RSTS/E was pronounced "riz-tiz-ee"

[@daffyduk77]

Aah, so that's where CP-M's PIP came from

[@ethandicks3]

The numbers cycling on the LEDs is most likely the "idle job". It was common for 1970s-era PDP-11 OSes to a) have a job that ran when no other job needed to run, and b) that job often updated the lights on the front panel so you could see that it was running. In the days before digits (PDP-11/70 and earlier), it was often a strobe or "cylon lights" across the width of the front panel. For display with digits, it was often a counter like 1111...2222...3333... and for fun, on an octal display, 8888 and 9999 by superimposing two sets of digits rapidly to simulate 8 and 9. You could also tell how busy the machine was by how fast the lights changed. If the machine spent lots of time "doing nothing", the lights advanced quickly. When there was actual "work" being done, the updates slowed. A relic of a time when everything had status lights.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

Sun had the same on the machine in Sun-3 and early Sun-4 machines.

[@slipangle3027]

god I love how SMOOTH that terminal scrolls...and the amber phosphor...oh man I don't need one but I really want one now.

[@Stoney3K]

Looks like the 77 on boot may be because the power supply didn't signal power good to the CPU and the CPU is kept in halt. So it would be a good idea to check the capacitors on those other power supplies next.

[@jessihawkins9116]

oh yeah? how would you know 🤨

[@ToasterWithFur]

​@@jessihawkins9116 oh yeah? How would you know that they don't know 🤨🤨

[@jessihawkins9116]

@@ToasterWithFur well, um…..😕

[@Dr_Mario2007]

Yep, I can see that happening. I would also look at the CPU card too for marginal capacitors around the linear regulators to make sure there's no chance that it would scramble the processor chip, and/or its power-on reset circuit too - linear voltage regulators tend to run hot and obviously electrolytic capacitors don't like heat.

[@russellhltn1396]

I agree it was likely a faulty power up reset function.

[@lumpytapioca5062]

Tip from the ancients: For insight into what a cpu is running, if halted, or wait looping, get a little AM radio, put it near the boards. Doesn't need to be that close. Tune around, you will hear things and eventually find it a comforting connection, especially at the layers you're working at with lower Mhz machines. Augmented reality in the EM spectrum. The method is cheap, and will work with all your stuff. I think you'll dig it and it'll help. And that box *really* wants a Unix v7 or BSD on it. A shell, a C compiler, a /dev directory, and simple configuration? Home. And the best bridge to today. RSTS/E and RT-11 admin will demand endless study of the orange wall of manuals, with stuff you'll never need or use. Nobody wants that.

[@edgeeffect]

Unix?! Blasphemy! RSTS!!!!!!

[@Veso266]

This comment doesnt seam to be written by a human

[@srdau2]

I loved those manuals. 😢

[@frankowalker4662]

I'm crrently at 5:30. As soon as you turned off then on the terminal that quickly, I knew it would'nt start again. The sudden inrush of power without anything having a chance to discharge is bound to kill some components. Usualy caps, which can then overload the first stage of the PSU. :( Nice work with the PSU fix.

[@jonathanvanier]

Yup, I cringed when I saw that too 😵

[@hicknopunk]

Yeah...I wait a good amount of time before I power up after fully discharging the caps, even on modern systems. It is a practice I learned in the 80s and cannot hurt even if it might not be needed anymore.

[@Stoney3K]

@@hicknopunk Those capacitors were going to pop sooner or later anyway. The keyboard error was already a sign that the PSU was on its way out.

[@edmckay2424]

In high school (1980) we had a 2 terminals to a PDP 11/70. A bunch of us were enthusiast. Created my acct 217,200. classmates even made some pretty impressive games like ADVENT1-4 in BASIC. There was like 35 terminals connected, schools in Western NY. HELLO 217,100 was the login verbiage. Wish I knew how KB0 logged in.

[@KameraShy]

When powering up vintage electronics for the first time in who-knows-how-long, it is always a good idea to open the thing up and do a physical inspection. Capacitors of that era are notorious for going bad and leaking very toxic stuff that will even eat away traces. Nichicon is supposed to be a quality brand, but there are stories of forgeries over the decades.

[@chrissingleton6029]

I couldn't agree more!!

[@AureliusR]

Do you honestly think he doesn't already know this...?

[@royvarley]

By the way, RSTS stands for "Resource Sharing Time Sharing". The default mode on any terminal is running the BASIC programming language. So, you can type any valid BASIC command and get a result. EG: PRINT 4+5 should give 9 and then the "Ready" prompt. I think. Soooooo long ago....

[@FayeSalwin]

There were several available shells, one was BASIC, like you say, but rt11 and rsx11 were possible and dcl. It was probably configurable per user, but I wasn't an admin back then.

[@mercster]

I love that old smooth scrolling on the old VT terminals. Have never been able to replicate it in a Linux terminal application.

[@mitchlichtenberg1858]

Very likely the stuff you saw on startup was the end user application (CCS may be whatever commercial app the auto shop used for its customers). The console might have different stuff going on than a user terminal. (perhaps plug a terminal board in and see if you get something on a different port?). I never used RSTS much, so it's all a huge guess. The LEDs counting could just be the idle job letting you know the system is alive?

[@mistie710]

Got to admit, it reminded me of the LED display on the front of an 11/70 where the LEDs would wipe back and forth across the address bus display.(ISTR anyway)

[@Buurtspoor]

If I remember correctly the disk rebuild is like a chkdsk on dos. It is started because the system was not correctly shutdown by switching off or restarting from the frontpanel.

[@Stoney3K]

Bingo. Linux used to do the same thing when it was still using the ext2 filesystem, with ext3 and later, the filesystem was journaling so any file system damage could be easily repaired. NTFS will also rebuild the disk when the system wasn't properly shut down and the disk is marked as 'dirty'.

[@Dr_Mario2007]

Yep, I would think so, it's basically like chkdsk, which most OSes have had a form of, especially Linux and Windows OSes, to verify that the file system bitmap isn't corrupted, and then mark it as checked (and potentially repaired) so the OS can proceed as normally.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I recall the RSTS/E error was “?Disk pack needs CLEANing”.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

12:07 I had a alook at the V9.0 docs. Answering “no” gives access to some low-level system maintenance options, but nothing resembling a “single-user” mode. Or you can answer “start” and then choose from the available “monitors” (“kernels”, I guess) to boot (type “?” to have it list what’s available). There might be a single-user one, but I don’t know.

[@ChristopherHailey]

I used to work on RSTS back in the early '80s,cool to see it booting on a vintage machine. We were on an 11/34. It's a very strange OS, really unique

[@steveschafer5712]

My first exposure to computers after college was on RSTS back in the mid 70's. I remember there weren't directories but you had your project/programmer number and that constituted the place where you put all your files. File names were 6 letter/numbers with 3 for extensions due to the way characters were encoded into 16 bit words. There was no lower case, which might be why it didn't like the "yes" you typed in lower case. We programmed in Basic. Your memory space was 32k for your program and another 32k reserved for the system. It's amazing how much you could get done in 32k.

[@wtmayhew]

I recall text string handling was a little weird in PDP/11 FORTRAN due to encoding three alphabetic characters into one 16-bit word. You had to normalize strings before comparing them. That was like 47 years ago and the exact details are a little hazy after that long.

[@MarshallGates]

RSTS/E was my first DEC OS. I used it from 1975 through 1985.

[@AureliusR]

Is it true that it was pronounced "riz-tiz-ee"?

[@MarshallGates]

@@AureliusR ris-tis-ee s not z but yes that is how I was taught to say it back in the day.

[@s1rb1untly]

I know I speak for many of us here when I say that I'd like to see some more PDP-11 stuff. I remember my hometown library used one because for the catalog they used these exact same amber phosphor DEC terminals... These systems always fascinated me, especially with their 3 chip design for CPU and FPU... The smooth scrolling and crisp, high resolution text was mesmerizing after seeing the craptacular output of the Apple II systems I was accustomed to using; it wasn't until around 1989 that we finally saw Microchannel based IBM 386s that could compete at my school...

[@ChrisCebelenski]

It looks to me like that RSTS/E system has been customized (It's pronounced riss-tuss btw) and it could be looking for a system password. (VMS could be configured to do this too.) Most of that startup was in trouble without the required disks being present and it was asking non-OS type questions leading me to wonder how it was configured and for what specific purpose. But I'd bet it's looking for a system password, which wouldn't echo. If you get past that, then it's HELLO to login, and you need a pair of numbers separated by a comma (project and programmer numbers), with 1,2 being the system account. If you DON'T start timeshareing at the boot, you should be able to get into a minimal maintenance mode and modify some system settings, the bootup script, etc.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

12:33 I remember when the main campus 11/70 went down due to a power glitch (e.g. lightning strike), it would typically take 10-15 minutes to come up again.

[@axelBr1]

From 1993 to 2002 the software I used for work ran on VAX/VMS, (I loved the DEC ecosystem, and great to see a VT320 after all these years). When Jurassic Park came out and they restarted the UNIX system, I was thinking that if it had been a VAX Cluster, they would have all been eaten by the time they managed to convince everything to boot and join the cluster.

[@KitsuneAlex]

I had a terrible fucking day, i made some comfort food and now i've got a fresh Usagi video to watch. You literally made my day

[@louwrentius]

I’m still reeling from your collab with Veritasium 😆🌷 I’m really into the PDP stuff, due to its connection to Unix and C if I’m not mistaken.

[@ordinaryk]

AT&T Research Unix was written for the PDP-11, which may be why 16-bit computing became a de facto standard. Before that, word lengths between different computers varied widely.

[@Bobbias]

Thanks for pointing out the collab with veritasium. I might have gotten around to watching that video, but I might have skipped it too, if not for finding out he appears in it.

[@ChristopherHailey]

Actually the IBM 360 was probably the one that cemented 8 bit bytes. DEC made a lot of 12 bit machines and used to like octal which is why there is so much octal in Unix

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

DEC made 18-bit, 12-bit and 36-bit machines (in roughly that chronological order) before their first byte-addressable architecture in the PDP-11. A prototype of Unix was actually first created on an old PDP-7 (18-bit machine). I guess that proof of concept allowed the Bell Labs folks to get funding for their nice, new PDP-11 to use to bring Unix to its full fruition.

[@bzuidgeest]

The power supply in your pdp is probably in a similar state as your terminal power supply. I suggest you check them. Might even be hanging the CPU if power doesn't come up fast enough. Or maybe the power on reset stuff is broken or to slow because of power supply failure.

[@UsagiElectric]

That's a good idea! The power supply itself looks to be in pretty good shape, but I'll take another in-depth look at it. Another potential error could be the terminal sending a "BREAK" signal on power up in response to junk being sent out the MUX port, though that one feels less likely as this didn't start happening until the HDD was installed and the added load of spinning it up.

[@bzuidgeest]

@@UsagiElectric you'll figure it out. Something to look forward to in the next video. Final hint, appearances can be deceiving. Measure. Especially things like power on reset stuff might appear to function fine, just not within spec.

[@Buurtspoor]

I ran RSTS/E systems for many years and loved them. Way better than RSX. Very reliable and user friendly. It was the best multi user / timesharing system for this type of computer.

[@ChristopherHailey]

I went from RSX to RSTS so I had quite the opposite opinion :) I just thought RSTS was wierd. RSX was originally developed by DEC but RSTS was not. It was truly a unique OS

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

I couldn’t understand the RSX concept of having to “install” a program as a task before you could run it ...

[@ChristopherHailey]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 TKB in general was alchemy but if you know what you're doing you can really make the thing sing or if you don't you can make quite a mess. It was really all about dealing with memory, back in the days of Kilobytes rather than gigabytes. I remember running multiuser in 128K, hard to believe now. VMS was interesting too, it was really built around virtual memory and shared libraries, not an afterthought like other operating systems, even today. By installing stuff the OS can really optimize stuff and make it really go fast. VMS was waaaay faster in those days than other OSes and RSX could really move, but it was a pain to do it right.

[@musik8000]

@@ChristopherHailey TKB -- I worked on a fortran program on RSX-11M with an overlay file a few pages long that took 45 minutes to link on an 11/73. Those were the days: PIP, EDT, RMD, and the occasional wrong-way BRU.

[@ChristopherHailey]

@@musik8000 Yeah, TKB was a beast, putting together an overlay structure bordered on the black arts.

[@adriansrealm]

The way you powered the terminal off then on in less than a second you can't tell me you didn't power surge it.

[@MarshallGates]

That's probably what pushed the capacitors over the edge.

[@adriansrealm]

@@MarshallGates And the caps weren't even THE problem, sure they weren't healthy and still should have been replaced.

[@haraldtscherne7487]

Isn't it amazing that this old hardware works totally fine after so many years even -sorry I have to say that- you do NOT treat it with proper respect (anti-static!!)? It's a very (very!) long time since I last used a RSTS (pronounced "Ristos") but if my memory doesn't fail me: the "disk is being rebuilt" occurs at boot time when you did NOT shut down the system properly ... it could take quite some time on larger disks. About the login: could be normal that the system doesn't echo your typing for security reasons, try HELLO 1,1;SYSMGR or HELLO 1,1;SYSTEM, these used to be default accounts. Maybe you're lucky! Love your videos, looking forward to the next one every week.

[@chumbawumba1959]

Just to keep you honest ... those of us DEC-heads who worked on this stuff back in the day pronounced RSTS as "ris'-tus".

[@stevedonkers9087]

Enjoyed both this and your collaboration with Veritasium!

[@edgeeffect]

I haven't booted RSTS (I don't know if it's just our college but we always called is ruhs-tuhs) since 1985.... so looking forward to watching this... if it was an 11/23 or an 11/73 with a VT100, it would be perfect.... but this brings on the nostalgia quite nicely as it is.

[@mistie710]

I must admit that I haven't touched a RSTS/E machine in anger for a couple of decades but the last version I worked with was RSTS/E 10.1 which you needed to log into before it would work by typing LOG p,pn or HELLO p,pn. It would then ask for a password. "p,pn" was shorthand for "project, programmer", each of which would be an integer between 0 and 254 (there were a few accounts that you needed to avoid, for example [0,1], [1,0] to [1,2] and a few more that I won't go into here). You may have a problem finding passwords for anything (up until RSTS/E V7.0 you could find the passwords for everything in plain text in a file in [1,1] but everything was encypted and hidden for V8.0 onwards).

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Did “I«p»,«pn»” still work?

[@spasticjackson9578]

Oh man, that would incredible if he got though with that. I am not a "computer" guy at all but I find these videos exciting.

[@srdau2]

@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes.

[@UsagiElectric]

I actually gave this a shot last night! Typing "HELLO" gets me to a user prompt, which I follow with 1,0 (or other variations), and then it hits me with a password prompt and I come to a halt there. Without knowing the specific user,project and password, I just get stuck. I tried to usual suspects (SYSMGR, SYSTEM, etc.) to no avail. But, if I hit "NO" at "Start Timesharing" I can get to a pretty low level boot screen where I can view the directory listing with DIR and run some other simple things. So perhaps there's a thread there I can start pulling on!

[@UnCoolDad]

Our school had RSTS on a PDP 11/70 for student use. This brings back memories.

[@robertdutcher8081]

I would image that hard drive asap.

[@horusfalcon]

I never got opportunity to fool with any DEC gear, but always wanted to so watching you get to it here is a real hoot. Love the bunny at the end of this video.

[@jeffweber8244]

You stirred a few memories of these beasts! In the early 90s I was a young buck working on a pair of (old at the time) PDP-11s running RSX-11. My task was to install TCP/IP libraries and create some basic network test/demonstration applications in prep for a large app development effort. Fun video. On the stuck address line debug, I believe you could have removed the RAM chips one at a time and retest the line. The CPU should have still generated the addresses even without all RAM present. It would have told you which chip was holding the line high if you cared to know. Anyway, I liked your fix of socketing all of them and replacing with new.

[@videosuperhighway7655]

damn That HD sounds brings back so many memories. Todays mega helium drives are so damn quiet even the seeks are quiet.

[@hangonsnoop]

VT 320's were always soothing to use because of their warm amber glow and smooth scrolling.

[@ActionRetro]

Amazing, what a roller coaster

[@your_utube]

Only read about PDP8/11 during my CS studies in the late 80s, but never used one. Interesting to see how one of these starts up. Sure you will get it going eventually, and will be eagerly watching that vid as usual . Thanks for your dedication and hard work!

[@netdudeuk]

Fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

[@batterymakermarkii2654]

I was amazed that thing came to life after being dormant for so long

[@UnCoolDad]

Some RSTS stuff I remember: Our school system had a default demo login: To login type "LOGIN 100,100" Password: demo Might also try typing "HELLO" to wake it up. This is from the 80's so my memory may be off 😊

[@alanmichaels8774]

I'm late to the party but thank you. I was a DEC OEM dealer for many years. I was the president of DEBUG (Digital Equipment Business User Group) special interest group of DECUS for several years. I was also a regular exhibitor it Comdex. If I said my name, I'm sure some grey beards would know exactly who I am. In any event, I won't give you any advice. I just wanted to thank you for keeping the PDP-11's memory alive. I loved those RSTS-E machines.

[@AureliusR]

You mean your name, that's in your username? Alan Michaels?

[@Aethelwolf]

Ahh, the PDP memories

[@timc3600]

That VT320 issue looked terminal. Glad it was only some bad caps.

[@kpanic23]

I see what you did there!

[@cumberland1234]

When it hangs at during initial boot it may be worth trying pressing halt on, halt off, reboot.

[@Donnie_M.]

Imagine being able to get a copy of the circa 1980's Public Library Card Cataloging program. Remeber the terminals looked just the one in this video. Amber monitor too.

[@wotsac]

I believe you're thinking of Dynix. If anyone finds a copy, Foone really really really wants it.

[@Nerd3Ddotcom]

HELLO 7,11 GAMES RUN DUNGEO "You re standing in front of a white house" P.S. PDP11/34 and a VT100

[@berndeckenfels]

Always amazing how neat those boot screen where

[@frednance3988]

I used to work with a VAX and a ManMan mainframe when i was in my 20's. I've worked with HP 9000's, ATYT Unix, SCO Unix. Now it's Windows Servers, VM Ware, etc. We've come a long way.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Your version of RSTS is highly customized. The normal startup looks much simpler. It will also ask you for username and password. The bonkers LEDs are normal, this just lets you know that the cpu is running and the OS is booted. If it stops, your system has crashed. 🙂 I had a RSTS system for years at work to test and repair peripheral modules. 11/83, 11/23, 11/44 and some more. Installed new versions from 1/2 inch reel tapes.

[@autarchprinceps]

Wow. That terminal is scrolling so smoothly. I wish modern terminals did that.

[@russellhltn1396]

Trust me, from someone who lived that era, you'd probably turn it off in a day or so. It slows you down.

[@Ice_Karma]

@@russellhltn1396 Agreed. That said, there's a few terminal emulators that can do smooth scrolling, and sometimes other "fun" and "retro" features like simulating the appearance of scan lines. I don't use one, so Google is your friend. 😸

[@blob537]

​@@russellhltn1396 I was going to say the same thing. It looks pretty for the first 2 minutes but it gets old pretty fast. I always turned it off, too.

[@autarchprinceps]

@@russellhltn1396 Sure, because it is slow, but even if you scroll slowly, it isn’t that smooth on Windows or Linux today, console or UI. And why not combine smooth and faster. You’d think we’d have the computing power for that after decades of improvement

[@tschak909]

Hey David. Great job! :) (RSTS is pronounced "ristis") :)

[@MarshallGates]

RSTS/E on the 11/40 at school

[@mistie710]

@@MarshallGates Just missed out on an 11/40 but used an 11/44 and an 11/70 at work between 1985 and 1993 when Dodgy Bob bought it all and we shoved an ICL DRS in as a replacement.

[@edgeeffect]

We always said RuhsTuhs at our college in SW England.

[@gregfelice1969]

Love this channel

[@andreas9238]

Oh seeing those caps, some words out of my years of repairing old stuff (and especally dicking around with bad caps) 1) Always use good quality replacements, cheap ebay-kit style caps may work for a while but it generally ain't worth the effort to even try. Panasonic, Nichicon or Rubycon, you name it. Do not settle for less. If possible go for 105°C rated "Low ESR" types. 2) in anything like a PSU, or around voltage regulators, basically everywhere you find big beefy caps, going up by a bit is generally no problem. caps tend to have 20+% tolerance towards higher value and as long as you stay withing the same ballpark it generally will work. I would avoid going up by a factor of 2 or more, as it may change regulation behavior or lead to slow ramp up of voltages. but going from 1000 to 1500µ or 2200 to 3300 is usually no issue (in a PSU). 3) If one cap of a style is leaky, exchange EVERYTHING of the same brand as well, the others will most likely follow soon 4) trust your nose as soon as any faint smell of fishy caps is there, power down, find them, swap them, electricity plus cap juice gives worse corrosion that letting the thing just sit 5) early 90s SMD aluminum eletrolytics: they will leak. basically no exceptions, getting better from maybe 1997 on, the issue was a mixture of solvents used in cleaning plus cap properties. early 2000s cap plague was a different machanism, mainly chinese copy of electrolyte formulation missing the secret sauce that would make it (chemically) stable. 6) swap in low esr aluminum for vintage tantalums, generally swap all tantalum caps on suply rails (usually big or on power busses on the board), leave small (

[@peddersoldchap]

This should be pinned!

[@Clavichordist]

The 77 error can also indicate a timing issue causing the CPU to not complete its initialization due to buss timing issues. I've seen that issue caused by a bad clock circuit on the old Ontel systems. I suspect the VHS device error is related to some kind of missing hardware, a controller perhaps, that the system is looking for on boot. All and all, this is fun stuff and it's great to see the old machines operating again. From 1988 to 1992, I was a computer operator and supported a VAX 8350 and a bunch of 11/780s all running VMS and operating in a cluster. Connected to the 11/780s were TU78 tape drives and two LP27 printers. Those printers were mean and would never fold the paper properly! I would go in on a Saturday shift and find paper streamed all over the computer room. The TU78s and the tape drive connected to the VAX 8350 could back up to a 2540 bpi tape in 20 minutes. I timed my other chores I had to do during the shift around the backups and would return to the computer room just in time to place the next tape on the drives. I miss that environment and the quality of the hardware that DEC made in those days. We see nothing like that today.

[@pklausspk]

Such a nice machine! I started my career on an Ericcson 260 in 1983 which looked quite similar. Wish I could see it boot these days.

[@stevesnow9259]

I used to run a multiuser BBS back in the mid 80’s running RSTS. I now have two PDP 11/73’s and two MicroVax II’s that I am working on restoring. I would love to get my hands on a copy of some of your PDP software. I also have quite a few DEC diagnostic disks you may be able to use.

[@rudiklein]

I haven't read all the comments, so it might have been mentioned before: I think you had to type in YES in capitals. I started my job at DEC in 1980. I've worked with RSTS/E as an operator and system manager. We used teletypes like the LA100 and LA120. I remember you had to login with HELLO 1,4 if you wanted system privileges and start some commands with PLEASE. I started with the gigantic VT52 terminal, later we had the VT100, VT220, VT320 and VT420. The latter one was able to display color if I remember correctly. You used sequences to control the VT, like 1m for highlighted text. Later we moved to VAXes running VMS, with DCL as commandline language. Man, I'm old 😂

[@GerryD65]

Few comments from a die-hard RSTS/E guy: 1) RSTS/E 10.1 (last version of RSTS/E) supports post-Y2K (I'm running a system now that shows todays date just ducky) 2) Disk being rebuilt is a file system check/fixer when the system was shutdown without a clean 'unmount' 3) Some liked smooth scroll, most hated it because it artificially limits baud rate/speed to somewhere around 4800 baud (effective, regardless of actual baud) as it took time to scroll and the terminal would send an XOFF to stop serial comms until the scroll completed, then an XON to continue (it looked cool, but wasn't practical) 4) That is very definitely a modified/customized version of RSTS/E - some components of standard startup are there, but with some custom overlay script 5) They likely replaced the default login program (that does not look like any part of the 9.x login program) and that may disable echo as some form of security. My guess is you are supposed to "blind-ly" type in a PPN (like 1,2 - literally number 1 a comma and 2), ENTER, then the password and ENTER to complete a login. But just a guess. 6) Usually, you would create a kernel that only supported devices you had to limit the amount of memory the kernel used, but in this case, likely some commercial packaging of RSTS/E included a kernel with nearly all supported devices "SYSGEN'd" in. Which does slow initial boot time a little. 7) You MIGHT be able to hit Control-C at the first prompt to do startup (after the "60 Devices Disabled") as technically, RSTS/E is running at that point and the scripts that start after that prompt just setup operating programs and environments up. It's fully functional at that point, and if they didn't trap/stop the control-C, you'll likely be dumped into DCL (or possibly Basic). If you get there, you can so a LOT with tailor the system, setting/changing password, etc 8) The cycling numbers are just the "modern" way of showing the CPU idling. On old PDP with individual lights, the equivalent was a row of lights going back and forth when the CPU was idle (like the eye on a Cyclon). The 83/84 just used the boot diagnostic panel for that (it's not really useful, just sort of cool, though you can sometimes tell the CPU is busy (or halted) by looking at them.

[@PetesGuide]

If you have any more problems, you can use the GRIPE command to complain to the system administrator. Oh the joys of getting an 11/73 with a Fujitsu double eagle hard drive and a slot-loading reel-to-reel tape drive to communicate with PCs running AutoCAD!

[@radman999]

Was pleasently surprised to see you on Veritasium's latest! Good on you!!

[@poofygoof]

I learned BASIC plus and WATFOR in high school on PDP-11s, mostly ADM3A terminals but also had some Heath/Zenith VT52 clones, teletypes, and others I don't recall. we pronounced it "riss-dees." I remember poking around in DCL and unsuccessfully trying to get TECO to work on the VT52 clones. The BASIC Plus system served terminals in three classrooms, and the FORTRAN system only one due to increased load of compilation I guess. It always impressed me so many users could do work on the same system.

[@chiefgecko]

Wow, TECO ... 30 years ago came rushing back in an instant

[@lednerg]

All I know about the PDP-11 is that they used them to render Tron (or at least some of the sequences) over 40 years ago. I have no clue how they did it or what kind of extra hardware was needed to get the images on film, but I'm still in awe of what they were able to pull off. It's what got me into doing CGI professionally.

[@B-System]

That was actually the Foonly F1.

[@timothynolan7250]

That tower is sick!

[@gameboy881]

I used RSTS/E on pop 11/70 when I study in the university, I remembered typing HELLO to login and BYE to logout

[@davidbarts6144]

I used RSTS/E in high school and at that stage you are expected to type HELLO to initiate the login sequence (system will prompt for account and password). But it should be echoing what you type, so something odd is happening there. RSTS accounts are of the form p,pn where p = project, and pn = programmer number, both are three-digit octal numbers. System manager's account is 1,2. Of course, you will need to know the password to get in. Default password for 1,2 is SYSTEM so maybe you can get lucky with that.

[@rhialtothemarvellify]

You may need to type some particular control character first to get its attention... ^C or ^Z or ^E or something like that.

[@davidbarts6144]

P.S. I believe the command to reenable keyboard echo is SET ECHO, so you might want to type that. It should work even though you are not logged on (a subset of commands is allowed to be executed without having to log on). Also make sure to type uppercase until you can issue a SET LC INPUT command to enable lowercase.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Pressing RETURN should be sufficient to wake up a login process.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

OK, to amend the above, I don’t think pressing RETURN was enough. You had to type a command, normally “HELLO”. Also on our installation, you could just type “I”. You can put the account code on the same line or in response to the subsequent prompt.

[@lumpytapioca5062]

You need to bequeath your machines real names, like with your bunnies. It has long been known that a computer without a good name grows sad, distant, contrary, and obstinate. Also, thank you so much for your hard work.

[@edgeeffect]

We had a name for ours.... we called it "The PDP" ;)

[@stamasd8500]

Sad, Distant, Contrary and Obstinate are all good names for computers. :)

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

When our system manager first setup DECnet between the old PDP-11/70 and the newer VAX-11/780, their node names were “PDP::” and “VAX::”. After the 11/70 was retired, and a second VAX was installed, he had the bright idea of giving it the node name “VEX::”. Let us just say that, with users from a variety of international origins, speaking English with a variety of different accents, this was a source of endless confusion ...

[@p-196]

I love this orange monochrome CRTs.

[@guilherme5094]

Really nice👍

[@FreejackVesa]

Test it for the “y2k bug”. Not even joking -if it fails going to 84 then I’d think it would fail for 2023 thinking it’s 1923. Really curious to see what would happen. I’m guessing it probably won’t burst into flames even though Leonard Nimoy made it sound like it was going to be the apocalypse in his preparing for y2k vhs tape from back in the day.

[@JosiahGould]

"Your toaster will eat your tie as airplanes fall from the sky."

[@MarshallGates]

1984 is before version 9 came out so it knows that's not valid. I am pretty sure it will have a Y2K issue unless it was patched.

[@mistie710]

@@MarshallGates I actually worked on a particular system that worked under BASIC_PLUSto get it to work beyond 1999. It would appear that the DEC date actually worked beyond 1999 if you took the date variable as a 2 byte positive only rather than a sign-and-magnitude integer, so it was possible to allow the date to run up to 31-Dec-2035 but in order to do it you needed to write a specific function that allowed for that as well as display the year as four digits rather than two. However I did this using Sector 7's BASIC_PLUS cross-compiler on Unix so I wouldn't be too sure if this can be done on original metal.

[@BoredInNW6]

To test that, I just booted RSTS/E 9.6 (a slightly later version) in an emulator, and it rejects any attempt to enter the year as 23, or to use four digits.

[@stamasd8500]

No, it probably fails going to 1984 because RSTS 9.5 was only released in 1987. :) It wouldn't recognize 1984 as a valid year.

[@michaeledwardharris]

I recall downloading an RSTS/E manual from an hpvc bbs in the early 90s.

[@billb6283]

I enjoy your vintage computer restorations and presentation style. For the software side you should look into the simh emulator. It can emulate many different mini-computer hardware such as PDP-11s. You can practice installing and get familiar with many mini-computer OSs on a Local PC, without booting your actual hardware. There are many prebuilt and not, DEC (and other) OSs to experiment and learn on, Including RSTS and RSX. Plus they run much faster on modern hardware. So you can get to learning faster because they startup faster. Less wear and tear on your actual hardware.

[@Renville80]

This form factor of the PDP11 reminds me of the Fluke 1720A industrial controller I once had. Rack-mount style, touch-screen CRT, 5 1/4" drive, multiple cards for RAM, floppy, etc. Seems they can be had for fairly cheap at times (just glimpsed one for sale on the E place in Texas for a Franklin).

[@TheRus13]

After the first check , change the electrolytic capacitors in the circuit .They may look normal outwardly, but their parameters will fly to heaven :) I also like to restore old things and face this all the time.

[@atkelar]

Might try the classic passwords: 1234, password, hi, hello, and maybe the name of the company... :)

[@SuperHaunts]

On our 11/45 mini running RSTS/E it would hang if the Line Printer wasn't ready and couldn't start the spooler. We also had to make sure that the 800 & 1600 BPI tape drives were turned on (not necessarily loaded, but on,or the buss had some issues being dragged down. RSTS/E was my favorite OS, allowing almost any resource to be Pip'ed or redirected to any other. Substitute an ASR33 for a keyboard, or most anything to anything.

[@royvarley]

The leds are probably 'going bonkers' because the system is trying to display the RSTS rolling lights pattern. I think, from memory, it's a set of 7 lights initially that bounce left to right, lose a light (so 6), bounce back, lose a light, and so on until 1 light and then start again. By the way, it's pronounced "Rus-Tus".

[@polluks2]

Wikipedia says /ˈrɪstɪs/

[@royvarley]

@@polluks2 Must have been a New Zealander who wrote that entry... 🤣

[@davidwise9119]

I did my first coding for money at Tektronix in the early 1980's, on a PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E. Often I'd be in the machine room trading RK05 disk packs. The idle display was a contiguous stretch of lit-up lights circling through the upper and lower row of indicators.

[@royvarley]

@@davidwise9119 I think you're right... dammit... 😏Maybe I was thinking of RSX11/M. Certainly back then I thought the bouncing lights pattern was cool. The company I first worked for was a timeshare bureau running RSTS/E on a PDP-11/45. But they hired us out to work on all sorts of DEC systems including RSX11/M. My very first consulting job was at a brewery who had a PDP8/E with an attached Industrial-14 controller. The PDP8 ran OS8.

[@wtmayhew]

I worked for an outfit which had a few hundred DEC terminals. My recollection was the VT-320s were kind of squirrelly and the VT-220s were more reliable. I also had a Rainbow with a monochrome green on my desk for a while. The O/S supplied for the Rainbow was MS-DOS 2.11. (CP/M and Pascal P-system were also available.) That RX-50 (?) dual floppy drive was very unreliable. There was a single drive motor and a complexly routed belt to turn both drives at once. That required the drives to turn in opposite directions. If you looked at the drive cross-eyed it would go out of alignment. It is hazy in my memory, but it seems like DEc had an oddball sectoring on the floppies, 400K (?). My possibly faulty recollection was Rainbows could read standard 360K floppies, but could not write them. I forget the details, but it seems exchanging floppies with IBM PC/XT users was a pain in the neck. As far as printers go, DEC was pretty bad at making their own mechanical elements. The first DEC printer we had was a re-labeled Printronix, the printer with metal lid and sloped front. That unit was reliable. Later we got a DEC line printer which was shaped a bit like a washing machine with plastic cover. The latter printer seemed like it requires DEC to repair a major issue almost weekly. LA-50 printers were very nice serial desktop printers. The LA-50s were probably made for DEC by a supplier such as TEC. We had quite a few LA-50s around years after most other DEC equipment was long gone. I wrote a graphics print driver in Borland Turbo C for the LA-50 in the mid 1990s. (No, I didn’t keep a copy of it.). WordPerfect also had an LA-50 driver.

[@bobnightingale1652]

My first programming job was on a PDP-11/23. I moved all my FORTRAN programs over to a Vax-11/750 a few months later (1985?). My fingers still know the EDT editor. I was using a real VT-100 for a while until I needed to do some graphics with a VT-241. Fond memories.

[@beer_goggler]

Ah the memories of PDPs, TSX+, RL02 disks and DIBOL programming.

[@royvarley]

Oh good heavens! DIBOL! I wrote so much! Even a really terrible pre-compiler which we called DI-plus!

[@beer_goggler]

@@royvarley I remember some of our code was sent through the post on a massive RL02 disk. Seems crazy now.

[@FayeSalwin]

BASPLUS and COBOL77 was how I cut my minicomputer teeth. I'd already been using TP3 on PCs by then, so it already felt antiquated. Still, the ISAM file handling was impressive compared to eg DBIV.

[@royvarley]

@@beer_goggler Yes indeed. In terms of advanced technology, we actually set up a laser link between our building and one of our customers - they were a whole 50m away! 😂AND I got to take home an acoustic coupler so I could dial in to our system from home! The coupler being a wooden box where you placed the handset of old style phones and set up a VT100 terminal so you could type and receive at some 10-15 characters per second!

[@joshuahudson2170]

On a slightly newer system we would cross-mount to reset the password.

[@BoredInNW6]

With operating systems of this era, they often had different boot modes depending on the value in a particular CPU register or switch settings on the front panel. So I'd consult the system manager's guide to see whether there's a boot mode to deal with a forgotten system password.

[@wizdude]

I’m so jealous of your VT320. I used to use something very similar every day and when I use VAX and similar systems emulated today it feels weird to access them with a modern terminal. I’d love to find something local at a good price. Thanks for the video. Cheers 😊

[@DelticEngine]

Thanks for another great video, but I feel it is important to say something on power supplies and capacitors so that the life of these wonderful old systems may be as long as possible and bring pleasure and enjoyment for the years to come. Briefly interrupting the power with the power switch to cause the system to boot suggests there are already serious power supply problems that need to be remedied. I would re-cap the power supply regardless of the apparent physical condition of the capacitors as bad capacitors can appear to be physically okay. I would then look at the other circuit boards, with a view to re-capping them so the condition is then known. Capacitors can fail intermittently as they age which, in my own experience has been just before they fail completely. I have personally rebuilt and repaired quite few power supplies. If the capacitors are not replaced then the output from the main power supply will be what is known as 'dirty power'. This means that instead of being a smooth direct-current output, an increasing number of high-frequency harmonics appears on the output which causes downstream filter and bypass capacitors to be overloaded trying to clean up the signal and then they fail. Another unwanted side effect is that the voltage can end up largely out of specification, from an electronics perspective, which also damages downstream components. A slightly less obvious problem arising from bad capacitors, especially in digital circuits powered from a switching power supply is that the 'dirty power' can, because of its pulsed nature, end up appearing as 'data' within the digital electronics causing phantom memory errors, crashes, and other data corruption. The best solution is therefore to replace the capacitors on all the boards in the machine if you wish to maximize reliability, data integrity, and working life.

[@AndyMcClements]

When working with a disk containing irreplacable data like that, a safe 'image' copy could be made before starting using 'dd' on another host.

[@MrBobmeadows]

When I came across RSTS at college, we always called it Ristus and RSX we called Risux. Bizarre hearing RSTS called R.S.T.S. Good luck.

[@video99couk]

I must have junked so many VT320 terminals when I was responsible for equipment disposal at a company back in the 1990s.

[@raymondallo9947]

My best memories of DEC just came flooding back. PDPs and then VAX. Running Oracle V2 on a PDP 11/44. Oh those were the days. Still sad that DEC went. Such an amazing engineering company and I still think they wrote the best manuals in the industry. I learned Fortran out of the DEC manual.

[@raymondallo9947]

@@kaiborniger I think it is the wrong bell you heard. Unless you were going to high school in the Netherlands

[@johnsalverda3358]

I was a sysop on a pdp11 box. We used bsd Unix 2.9.1. You have a terminal, I had a teletype. No experience with rsts/e except as a user. Lots of luck!

[@Bijoux_DerWunderCatsen]

That hdd sounds like a Sopwith Camel starting up. 💙💙💙

[@donaldshannon3764]

I just looked in my library and found the following: PDP-11 Systems Handbook covering MicroPDP 11/83; 11/73;11/53 and PDP 11/84. Also found a copy Digital RSX-11 Handbook. I used these extensively in 1990 - 1993 when I reverse engineered a PDP Bus to proprietary parallel interface board to develop test software. The board was in a PDP 11/53 in a letter sorting system being manufactured for the USPS. Are these of use to you ?

[@lumpytapioca5062]

I collected so many of those great little paperbacks. Digital considered good documentation part of the complete product. Those handbooks must have sold so much hardware...

[@numlockkilla]

They are. To many. Scan n upload or send in and he can.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

Bitsavers has a vast collection of DEC stuff. Have a look there, and see if there any gaps you can fill -- I’m sure they would appreciate the contribution.

[@zaprodk]

Smooth scrolling ❤

[@RoyHess666]

Damn, this smooth scrolling.... wish modern terminals would do that

[@CATech1138]

OMG...i haven't that drive spin up head clatter in decades

[@greglovekamp]

I was a sysadmin for 11/34, 11/44 and even a MicroPDP-11 (I don’t remember the model). Boy, have I forgotten most of what I knew. You are going to be hard-pressed to do much without passwords. Your best bet is to not start time sharing; use single user mode to reset some of those passwords to what you will know. 1,2 is the main admin account. 1,3 is the print spoiler, I think. Seems like I remember 1,4 and 1,8 doing something. I loved the PDP-11 both with RSTS/E 7 and RSTS/E 9. I remember writing a ton of scripts in DCL in version 9.

[@hessex1899]

RSTS/e is the most underapprecited of PDP OSes

[@lumpytapioca5062]

Using it is ok. Administrating it is tough.

[@MarshallGates]

Agreed, but then I am biased. It was my first.

[@mistie710]

@@lumpytapioca5062 Never had any problems myself!

[@misjavanlaatum]

That smooth scroll is so extra 🤣 almost makes it look fake (I know it's real of course)

[@cirencesterful]

Did you ever consider loading up an old BSD Unix? The original was built by Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun) on a PDP-11/45 I think. Most of the Unix systems at Berkeley around 1979/1980 were PDP-11/70. A PDP-11/83 would probably be able to use an old tape of an early version of BSD.

[@Fir3Chi3f]

Sorry, not related to this video; but I had no idea you were on Veritasium! That's super cool!