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by hazeii 1652 days ago
The LSI-11 and 11/23 jumped to 173000 at startup, so (re)booting them was just hit halt on the front panel and then enter '173000G' in ODT (the built-in octal debugger). If necessary, it would only take a minute or two to type in a bootstrap somewhere in RAM and execute (my boss at the time could do that faster across the toggle keys on the front panel of his larger PDP-11 than I could type it in).

I coded several bootstraps for PDP-11/23's, managed to get 4 different devices (DX,DY 8" disks, MX 5.25" and MZ 3.5" disks) complete with CLI into 256 words (2x256 byte OTP ROMs). Careful coding time, since one had to send the listing off to someone who could burn the ROMs and post them back.
2 comments
guerrilla 1652 days ago
> my boss at the time could do that faster across the toggle keys on the front panel of his larger PDP-11 than I could type it in

This is exactly what I waned to hear after watching the video of toggling posted below. I thought to myself there must have been people who could have done that in two seconds, but then I kind of doubted it because I didn't know how much rebooting was really done.

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cesaref 1651 days ago
Yeah, I had an LSI-11/23 when I was a student, with dual 8 inch drives and a Fujitsu drive (not an Eagle, it was 160Mb if I remember). This was all cobbled together equipment, but lots of fun trying to get it to work.

My bootstrap code loaded the first block from a floppy which had the boot code on it. The result was much easier to type, and I ended up with that boot code as a script so my much more powerful Amiga I was using as a terminal emulator could replay the boot code to start the machine.

Happy days!

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