Device Drivers

Custom device drivers were, and still are a large part of what made RSX so attractive to users.  If someone sold a thing that could be made to talk parallel, serial, Ethernet, analog or RS-232, an RSX device driver could be written to talk to it.

There never were very many people who wrote RSX drivers in the first place, and those who were truly proficient can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  Alan Frisbie, Jim McGlinchey, Ralph Stamerjohn, Bruce Mitchell, the DEC RSX Development Group (now disbanded) and DEC Computer Special Systems (ditto) were the few, the proud, who talked to the machines.

Bruce Mitchell still does RSX device drivers -- see his monographs on the topic. If you need a device driver written, inspected for Year 2000 compliance, ported from RSX-11M to M-Plus, or troubleshot for those lingering bugs -- yes, some are still hiding twenty years later -- well, there is really no other place to go.