NF6X
Veteran Member
I'm trying to find BASIC and other software for RT-11. I wasn't sure whether to start a new thread or resurrect this old one, but I chose to start a new thread since I'm not just asking about BASIC. And I also plan to ramble on a bit before I get to the point.
I'm just starting to experiment with RT-11 in SIMH to learn the ropes. I have a PDP-11/44 project in the works; it's approaching the end of the "gather pieces" phase, and I hope to get to the "emit smoke" phase sometime in the next several weeks. I have a pile of four PDP-11/44 chassis with about 1.8 CPUs worth of boards between them to hopefully Frankenstein into at least one working system, a heap of four RL02 drives with hopes of making at least two of them work, and a Kennedy 9610 9-track tape drive that needs a bit of work. Also an alleged tape controller board, a presumed GPIB board, and a DEUNA Ethernet board, all topped off with a VT131 terminal for a console. It'll be a cool system once it's assembled and working! I took off Friday to go pick up an HP 42U rack that ended up being free due to the eBay Bucks I accumulated over the last quarter of financial indiscretions. It took four of us to tip it over and slide it into my pickup truck (with a cargo shell), but I had to unload it and set it upright by myself. Naturally, I cheated.
The rack has sides and doors; I just have them pulled off for unloading. A couple pairs of slides for my RL02 drives are supposed to be on the way from Pinnacle Micro; I don't know yet whether they'll include the rack ears for the ends. I still need to find or make the rear rack ears for the PDP-11/44 chassis slides, and I'll need to procure some suitable slides for the tape drive.
Ok, I'm getting closer to the point. Honestly!
I have an RL02 image file of an RT-11 5.3 installation disk, and I gather that I should be able to bootstrap it onto my real hardware eventually with a TU-58 emulator program, using the magic of magic. I have tu58em_v1.4e built on my Mac, waiting until it's time to try booting up my 11/44. Until I need to do it for real, I'm playing around in SIMH to develop some clues about RT-11.
So now that I can virtually install RT-11 on an emulated system, I'm interested in what I can actually do with it. And, I'm not having much luck yet finding software. Many of the links I've found have gone stale. For example, this cool blog post makes reference to a "Languages Master" disk image that is said to contain BASIC-11, but the link to it is stale. Mr. Google didn't turn up the image for me, either. I'd like to have a BASIC interpreter and/or compiler for my eventual system. Can any of y'all help? Some other languages may also be interesting. I see that the basic RT-11 installation I made includes a file called "MACRO.SAV". Would that be a macro assembler?
I'm also interested in finding other fun and/or useful RT-11 software. I'd appreciate pointers to deposits of the stuff that I haven't managed to unearth yet. I'm mostly a hardware guy, so I'm interested in industrial-style control and data acquisition stuff. Programming languages like BASIC, C, Forth, etc. would also be useful.
I'm just starting to experiment with RT-11 in SIMH to learn the ropes. I have a PDP-11/44 project in the works; it's approaching the end of the "gather pieces" phase, and I hope to get to the "emit smoke" phase sometime in the next several weeks. I have a pile of four PDP-11/44 chassis with about 1.8 CPUs worth of boards between them to hopefully Frankenstein into at least one working system, a heap of four RL02 drives with hopes of making at least two of them work, and a Kennedy 9610 9-track tape drive that needs a bit of work. Also an alleged tape controller board, a presumed GPIB board, and a DEUNA Ethernet board, all topped off with a VT131 terminal for a console. It'll be a cool system once it's assembled and working! I took off Friday to go pick up an HP 42U rack that ended up being free due to the eBay Bucks I accumulated over the last quarter of financial indiscretions. It took four of us to tip it over and slide it into my pickup truck (with a cargo shell), but I had to unload it and set it upright by myself. Naturally, I cheated.
The rack has sides and doors; I just have them pulled off for unloading. A couple pairs of slides for my RL02 drives are supposed to be on the way from Pinnacle Micro; I don't know yet whether they'll include the rack ears for the ends. I still need to find or make the rear rack ears for the PDP-11/44 chassis slides, and I'll need to procure some suitable slides for the tape drive.
Ok, I'm getting closer to the point. Honestly!
I have an RL02 image file of an RT-11 5.3 installation disk, and I gather that I should be able to bootstrap it onto my real hardware eventually with a TU-58 emulator program, using the magic of magic. I have tu58em_v1.4e built on my Mac, waiting until it's time to try booting up my 11/44. Until I need to do it for real, I'm playing around in SIMH to develop some clues about RT-11.
So now that I can virtually install RT-11 on an emulated system, I'm interested in what I can actually do with it. And, I'm not having much luck yet finding software. Many of the links I've found have gone stale. For example, this cool blog post makes reference to a "Languages Master" disk image that is said to contain BASIC-11, but the link to it is stale. Mr. Google didn't turn up the image for me, either. I'd like to have a BASIC interpreter and/or compiler for my eventual system. Can any of y'all help? Some other languages may also be interesting. I see that the basic RT-11 installation I made includes a file called "MACRO.SAV". Would that be a macro assembler?
I'm also interested in finding other fun and/or useful RT-11 software. I'd appreciate pointers to deposits of the stuff that I haven't managed to unearth yet. I'm mostly a hardware guy, so I'm interested in industrial-style control and data acquisition stuff. Programming languages like BASIC, C, Forth, etc. would also be useful.