[vcf-midatlantic] Using simH to make a real bootable RSX11/M 3.2 RL02 disk

[David Riley]

On Feb 6, 2017, at 22:30, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> I skimmed the web for a week, plus got some ideas and suggestions from simH
> users.  The hard part was to find a way to get an operating system only
> found on RL01 drives to an actual RL02 drive.  Most people believe RSX11/M
> is better than RT-11 I don't know yet, I was more interested in the process
> of making disks using simH.  There is a lot of potential to do disk and
> tape operations with simH that would be impractical with actual hardware as
> very few of us have the real things.

"Better" is very subjective and depends on your use case. RT-11 is much lighter weight, but much less sophisticated. Think DOS vs. UNIX; DOS is a simple, single-user shell on top of the hardware, while UNIX is a grown-up OS with multiple users, processes, services, etc. but with higher overhead and a steeper learning curve. It's all a matter of what you want to use it for.


- Dave