Talk:VAX-11/780

I split up the 11/780 & the 11/785 because the formatting was all broken with the two info boxes on the same page...

Booting VAX-11/780

I'm currently trying to boot DEC Ultrix 1.1 on SIMH, using the vax780 (11/780) emulator - however, I am used to the 'vax' (MicroVAX 3900) emulator, which has its console environment in ROM (possibly EEROM). The VMS - before it was 'OpenVMS'! - documentation for the 11/780 mentions a console floppy and SIMH's vax780 source dir has a file named 'vmb.exe'; I think that this might be the minimal console environment that I need to carry out disk maintenance tasks to get Ultrix running, but I am unable to load it ('Invalid argument'). I have tried the 'fload' command and 'load -o vmb.exe 0' and 'run 2' - but the simulator just hangs.

Can anyone explain how the VAX-11/780 boots? Any hints would be appreciated!

It's... complicated.

and not 100% by any stretch, look at 4.2 BSD, and 32v for some hints... Odds are Ultrix being a 4.2BSD derived OS, it'll work better with forced bootblock injection... I bet you can even use BSD 4.2's bootblocks. I'm assuming you can extract the miniroot from the tape? I don't have access to Ultrix 1.1 so I can't spell it out..... neozeed 12:50, 12 June 2011 (PDT)