Talk:RSX-11

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Removed the following from the article:

"Dave Cutler is credit as RSX-11 chief-designer, but there is some controversy on the subject."

I don't know where the that came from, but I was a tech writer on RSX and Cutler was right there beside me :=). The RSX sources were published on microfiche and on one occasion a customer at DECUS asked one of the engineers about the "group pseudonym" used in the code. "What group pseudonym?" "Oh, you know 'Dave Cutler'. Nobody could write that much code." Well, he did.

He was one foul-mouthed fellow as well. He insisted on calling the fork list the "fork queue" and also created the famous error message,

IE.NFW -69 Path lost to partner

He roasted a pig for us when he left the group, wearing a T-shirt with the subtle slogan "fork queue".

I wrote the RSX DCL Manual and was the project leader (engineering, doc, and packaging) for Micro/RSX. Once I gave the canned "history of RSX" speech at DECUS. Ortolan88 15:42 Jul 21, 2002 (PDT)

PS -- I contributed to the RSX-11M/M-PLUS error-message manual that contained the error message and wrote the first RSX-11M/M-PLUS Glossary for the Introduction to RSX-11M-PLUS (my first serious technical writing) and sought fruitlessly (if somewhat tongue in cheek) to include the expression "fork queue" in addition to "fork list" in the glossary because it still appeared here and there in the code, file names, messages and the like, and should therefore be identified. The product managers turned me down, as they had turned Cutler down before (a daunting proposition, to be sure) on the original terminology. Ortolan88 20:52 Aug 4, 2002 (PDT)

Contents

[edit] RSX-11/B

I know it seems strange that /B would be developed / derived from /C, but that is indeed what I recall it saying in the manuals I had in the late 1970s. -- Rob Brown <brown@gmcl.com> —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.149.194.250 (talk) 16:01, 25 August 2004

There was a predecessor to RSX-11/B in RSX-11A; as far as I can remember RSX-11/C was a diskless version of RSX-11/B, just like RSX-11/S was a diskless version of RSX-11/M.
Then there was of course RSX-15 that ran on the PDP-15 18-bit computers; it came out in the middle of 1971 (I was on the first European training course). It was followed by RSX-15 Plus and later by RSX-15 Plus/III. It had many features later found in RSX-11/M (1974). -- Rien Timmer <Rien.Timmer at wxs.nl> —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.95.150.2 (talk) 08:49, 10 August 2005

[edit] RSX as papa

"RSX was a separate path at DEC and the progenitor more than anything of VMS that went to NT via Dave Cutler."
I'm having a great deal of trouble parsing this quote. Does "that" refer to "progenitor" or to "VMS"? It's difficult to make sense of the statement either way. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tabor (talk • contribs) 21:33, 8 February 2005

That statement seems pretty tortured, but the simple facts are these: Before Dave Cutler went on to participate in the VAX-A committee, he was the initiator and software lead for RSX-11/M and M+. IIRC, he, Peter Conklin, and Dick Hustvedt were the principal contributors to the design of Starlet, the software that went on to become VAX/VMS. Because of Cutler, VMS ended up looking a lot like a clean, 32-bit re-implementation of /M. Many software structures were brought forward and expanded: The ODS-1 disk structure became ODS-2, the QIO and AST mechanisms were brought forward and expanded, etc. (Thankfully, the taskbuilder eventually went away. :-) )
So now we just need a simple statement that sums all that up. ;-)
Atlant 01:08, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] RSX GPU

RSX is also the name for a Graphics Processor in the Playstaion 3, isn't it? This needs to be added, maybe RSX needs a diambiguation page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Steve a (talk • contribs) 18:27, 29 January 2006

[edit] RSX-15

An OS very similar to RSX-11M that ran on the 18-bit PDP-15. I no longer have access to published sources, or I would add it to the article. BenBurch 14:16, 10 November 2006 (UTC)

Binaries and sources for XVM/RSX V1A and V1B (the last versions of RSX-15) are available at [1]. It will be possible to install them in SIMH 3.7 (the current version at this time is 3.6-2, and XVM/RSX will not run in it due to several bugs) once it is released. There will probably also be a pre-installed disk image of it available as well. 207.153.26.200 08:55, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Article should be moved to RSX (operating system)

This article should be moved to RSX (operating system) and RSX-11 redirected to it. RSX originated on the PDP-15, and RSX-15 is very similar to RSX-11, especially RSX-11D. 207.153.31.5 13:01, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. Far, FAR more copies of the various flavors of RSX-11 were sold than RSX-15. RSX-11M(+) also has pride of place in being the system that Cutler developed first before he went on to apply most of the same principles to the second-generation VMS and third-generation WNT.
Atlant 15:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Just because RSX-11 is better known does not mean that RSX-15 shouldn't be mentioned in the list of RSX variants, and RSX-15 is RSX, but not RSX-11. RSX-15 and RSX-11 (especially RSX-11D) are very similar. RSX-11D is in many ways an RSX-15 "clone" (it is different in some ways, like the filesystem, and the MCR, which was heavily extended) for the PDP-11. I know because I am running XVM/RSX and several variants of RSX-11 (M, M+, and IAS) in emulators. If RSX-15 were added, the article wouldn't be just about RSX-11 anymore, and it wouldn't make sense for the article to be titled RSX-11 when it also mentions RSX-15. 207.153.26.235 13:53, 1 December 2006 (UTC)