Love at first - The start of my 11/83

[8008guy]

Well, after months of waiting I finally booted my pdp11!!!

It started life at an 11/23A. I pulled all the boards put in a new back plane (H9276-A). Found a H7861 power supply and replaced all the caps. I even stripped and repainted the front panel. The panel was in rather poor condition. My processor is a M8190-AE KDJ11-BF and the memory Clearpoint DCME/Q4E, 4Meg Memory. (PMI) Last week a found a FPA to plug in.

I was going to power the box up last night but discovered that the serial connector was broken and had to replace the header. I can't imagine how much force it took to break through all the even pins... IN any case nothing else was damaged.

I never could find the documentation to the DCME card. But from what I can tell mine is the only one I've seen on Ebay with the jumpers in for it to work in the PMI mode.

So being a TOTAL PDP novice, what next? RTFM I suppose. When I try and enter anything on the serial console I just get at signs in return... '@'. How to I get to the point where I can run diagnostics? The memory appears to test ok, I think...

My plans are to add a disk, hopefully the SD2SCSI or CF2SCSI. I do have both a SCSI and an MFM controller. Plus I will add a serial, parallel, and Ethernet. And ultimately run BSD, or Unix 7. Many years ago I actually sent to SCO and got an Unix source license.

Any advice appreciated!

len

 

[8008guy]

I got the console communications working both directions now so that whe I hit a key it show on the terminal. I had send on pin 8 and ground pin 7.

So being a TOTAL PDP novice, what next? RTFM I suppose. When I try and enter anything on the serial console I just get at signs in return... '@'. How to I get to the point where I can run diagnostics? The memory appears to test ok, I think...

len