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Finally, a colour head for my DEC PRO 380

C

ClassicHasClass

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I'm not a big DEC dweeb (I "only" have a DECmate II without floppy media, a VAXstation 3100 M76 running OpenVMS, an Alpha 164LX running Tru64 and this DEC PRO 380), but I do like the DEC PRO. I finally found a BCC03-06 cable to match the very dirty VR241 I landed, and now I can do "serious business" colour graphics in Venix!

https://www.floodgap.com/iv/3637

Actually, I'm pretty impressed with what Venix can do with screen graphics. Pie charts, raw plots, bar charts, scatter plots, even load and save video memory directly. This is a big jump over my old VR201. It's actually a good excuse to get a local uucp working since PRO/Venix has no networking. I just wish DEC didn't use so much proprietary crap; it took me ages to land the monitor and the right cable.

(Well, okay, there's one other DEC in my collection, a PDP-11/44 which is just occupying space in storage because I'm too scaredy-cat to fire it up.)
 
Hi,
As I see, you are running a copy of Venix 2.0 (provenix20) on your Pro380. Can you help me with a copy of the System Area diskette #1? Because this one is missing in the set I have.
Many thanks in advance!
// Peter
 
Sadly, I do not have floppies. It came with Venix on the hard disk, though it's missing a couple files apparently. I need to image the drive and replace it with one of Dave Gesswein's boards.
 
Can you do me the favor to just copy (with tar) the content of the /usr directory from your Pro380? When I am able to reconstruct the installation media I will share it with you.

Thanks in advance,

// Peter
 
Thanks, so I wait for your files from your /usr directory on your Pro380 - when you save these files and help me, you will probably be the hero who made it possible to restore and reconstruct a lost system ;-)

// Peter
 
Last edited:
The lost PRO/VENIX is based on System V rather than System III. I compared some header files in /usr/include/sys and foud there "revision 1.1". Also the existance of some files like "/etc/gettydefs" which did not exist in System III make me believe that PRO/VENIX release 2.0 is based on System V.

I will now take some binaries from System V for the PDP11 and check, if I can complete the missing parts of /bin with these files ...

@ClassicHasClass: If you have a chance to do at least an ls -l /usr on your Pro380 would help a lot to see what ist originally there ;-)

// Peter
 
RECONSTRUCTION SUCCESSFUL!

While it seemed that nobody has a set of working "System Area diskettes" I decided to reconstruct the missing parts ...

The I recreated the "System Area diskettes" and successfully installed PRO/VENIX V2.0 on my Pro380.

You can see it running here:

http://mira.blizznet.at/innonet/movies/Pro380/20220420_153409.mp4

Later I will publish a report and share the images with the community ;-)

// Peter
 
Unfortunately the ZIP file is too big to upload it here. Therefor I have sent a copy of the resurrected system to Warren Toomey. He might publish it on his minnie.tuhs.org - this is probably the best place for it.

// Peter
 
In the meantime I can already build the Venix kernel with the help of my reconstructed version of "uts.c":
Code: 
SUPER: make
=== Making venix for PRO 380 ===
        config -m master params.p380
        cc -c -I/usr/include conf.c
        mv conf.o c.p380.o
        cc -c -DMACH='"PRO380\0 "' -DVERS='"`date +%y%m%d%H`"' -I/usr/include uts.c
        mv uts.o uts.p380.o
        ld -k -i -X -x -u _sureg -u _mapallo low.pro.o c.p380.o \
                ../MDLIB.11.p380 ../IOLIB.pro ../OSLIB.11 uts.p380.o last.o
        kfix a.out venix.p380
        vstrip11 venix.p380
        rm a.out
        chmod 444 venix.p380
=== venix is now made ===
SUPER:

// Peter
 
After a few minor modfications of my reconstructed "uts.c" I could re-create the original kernel and boot it:
Code: 
pk$ ls -l /venix*
-rw-r--r--   1 bin      bin       100336 Jun 19  1985 /venix
-r--r--r--   1 root     sys       100336 Apr 30 12:56 /venix.test
pk$ uname -a
VENIX pro380pk SysVr2.0 22000001 PRO380 DEC00100
pk$
The file venix.test has exactly the same size as venix. The version number is different for identification!

// Peter
 
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