DEC Datasystem PDP-11/23+

This PDP-11/23+ comes from Earl Evans in Tigard, OR and has been kept in very good condition over the years. Earl had gone through a collection of dozens of RL02 10MB packs and put together a few with TSX and RT11 operating systems. Along with spare boards there is serial line cabling and bulkheads, a Qbus backplane and a PDP-11/03 (unpopulated).

Josh Dersch came down to help setup the Q-Bone provided by https://decromancer.ca. The Q-Bone is a powerful half width Q-BUS device with an integrated Beagle Bone built right on the board. It can provide several helpful features such as memory, tape and disk emulation. What we’d like to use this machine for is for software preservation of RL02 data and the ability to run RSTS/e v9.5 with virtual terminal emulation listening on a TCP port. Once that is set up, we’ll likely keep the RL02s powered off and add the PDP-11/23+ to the growing list of Vintage Remote Systems.

RSTS/e is a timesharing system that is quite similar to TOPS-10 on the PDP-10, but it was initially focused more on the education market with its primary user language being DEC BASIC. RSTS/e developed over the years to be a more feature rich timesharing system, but it is a great window into what low cost communal computing looked like in the late 1970s and into the 1980s.