PDP-11/45: First RT-11 Boot From Disk!

Not much technical in this post, except the big ticket news: after all the recent repairs and generating a fresh RT-11 pack RT-11 BOOTS FROM DISK!

It's been a very long road getting here, but the machine finally has a working, full-featured, operating system, capable of supporting self-hosted program development. Spent a few enjoyable hours editing, assembling, linking, and debugging some small MACRO-11 hacks directly on the machine, using the native RT-11 tools. This is probably a 40 year high-water-mark of functionality for these particular bits of hardware. Very satisfying!

Next up will be to clean and inspect the dozen or so RK05 packs that I have on hand, and retrieve and archive whatever content I can. That should let me clear off a few packs to create some space to experiment with some additional operating systems, including 6th Edition Unix.