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Most common data transfert medium on PDP / and most common boot device ??

G

Gerardcjat

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Two questions, please :

- When one wants to transfer data to another ** person's ** PDP, what is, the most COMMON medium used ??
- paper tape
- punched cards ;-)
- 8 inches floppy
- DEC tape
- "adapted" 5 1/4 floppy
- ????

Second question :
How "COMMON" are PDP booting from 8 " Drive(s) ** ONLY ** ?? I means with NO Hard Disk installed ??
 
These days, disk image via email is the easiest. The image can then be written to floppy or CF card and loaded on the target machine. Depending on the generation of machines you're talking about, original distribution would have been by mag tape, disk cartridge or floppy disk, depending largely on the source and the amount of material to be shared. Modem or direct wire transmission by Kermit or ftp were also used (if the operating system allowed). For the earliest machines or minimal systems, paper tape would have been common and was often the only medium available.
 
Back in the day when my employer produced software for PDP-11, the most common mean was to ship magnetic tape. I think we asked for the media to be returned in many cases.

As for the second question. Uhm. I'm speculating, but PDP-8 would use 8" as its primary medium, boot and storage. Look at the WPS-8 systems for instance. On the DECsystem 2020 you would boot the front end PDP-11/44 from 8", but it always came with hard drives. Other PDP-11 systems was 8" only, MINC-11 and PDT-11 are two examples.
 
When I worked at DEC in the PDP-11 diagnostics and hardware groups back in the late 70s / early 80s, the 'USB drive' of the day was the original DECtape, when we needed to get files from the PDP-10 timesharing system to a standalone PDP-11.

For most PDP-11 system use we carried our whole life around with us on an RK05 cartridge (data plus RT-11). This later morphed into using RL01/2 disk cartridges as they became more pervasive.

Don't remember using RX01/2 floppies hardly at all. Magtape sometimes, but usually to send/receive files to another site/customer.

Paper tape punch on PDP-10 to generate binary PDP-11 program diagnostic image for local PDP-11 hardware testing. Most PDP-11 diagnostics were edited/compiled/tested on PDP-10s using TECO, a PDP-11 assembler (MACY11 IIRC), and a PDP-11 simulator for debugging. Once we were happy with the program image would punch out the abs binary load paper tape and go off to the hardware lab for real iron testing.

Don
 
All the above good comments not withstanding - there's another point of view to consider.

Boot devices always gravitated towards being disks once available. They are the fastest random access mass storage. Hard disks being bigger, systems quickly outgrew floppies, if they had them. Floppies are also much more maintenance intensive. Hard drives - if neglected - have been known to be online for decades.

But those are the "Operations" POV.

The other viewpoint one might take to answer your question is what we used to call "Distribution Media". DEC frequently offered it's software distributed on various types of media. Over the years, this evolved from Paper Tape, to Disks and eventually Mag Tape. Preference varied based on the target system, era and what software we're speaking of.

However, over the years System Administrators most often moved to 9-Track tape. I have found this to be true for most large systems, and therefore I would say qualifies as "most common". DEC also offered TK50 and other "cartridge tape" later, but the period of these was much shorter than the 2 decades for 9-Track reels. Tape was preferred, not just for convenience, but it's storage density, robust physical nature and minimal cost. Pilferage of 9-Track was never a problem, like it was with floppies, HD packs and cartridge tape.

Just an alternative way to look at the questions.
 
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