RSX FAQ

In every field of human endeavor, there are some questions asked over and over ... and over ....

They are asked so often that someone on Usenet tagged them with the name "frequently asked questions," FAQ for short. These are questions that aren't stupid, but are heard so often that people tire of answering them repeatedly.

Therefore, to alleviate the load on the question-answerers, somebody wrote up a good answer for each question and put them into these things called FAQ files. So look here before posting questions to the primary Usenet newsgroup for RSX users -- which is currently vmsnet.pdp-11.  There are many other resources on the web as well, and most search engines will guide you to them with little trouble.

There are also a lot of questions that were asked only once, but the answers proved so interesting, useful, or obscure that they were placed in the FAQ to preserve them to the benefit of our posterity.

General

• General
  Things not addressed under hardware and software below

Software

• Software Generalities
  General topics not specifically addressed below
• The Executive
  The RSX Executive and its data structures
• The Terminal Driver
  Serial communication using TT: ports
• Other Device Drivers, and ACPs
  Software interfaces to disk, tape, and whatever
• Utilities
  Programs supplied with the operating system
• DEC Layered Products
  Things that run under RSX, including languages
• DECnet
  DECnet and other DEC networking products
• System generation (SYSGEN)
  System generation from a kit to a bootable disk

Hardware

• UNIBUS CPUs
  UNIBUS central processors and CPU options
• The UNIBUS
  The UNIBUS and expansion hardware
• Q-bus CPUs
  Q-bus central processors and CPU options
• The Q-bus
  The Q-bus and expansion hardware
• Disk
  DEC and third-party disk controllers and drives
• Interface Options
  Serial, parallel, analog, GPIB and whatnot
• Multiprocessor PDP-11s
  Never publicly released, but apparently still interesting