Settle down children, it’s time for another great article by Cameron Kaiser. This time, they’re going to tell us about the DEC Professional 380 running PRO/VENIX.
The Pro 380 upgraded to the beefier J-11 (“Jaws”) CPU from the PDP-11/73, running two to three times faster than the 325 and 350. It had faster RAM and came with more of it, and boasted quicker graphics with double the vertical resolution built right into the logic board. The 380 still has its faults, notably being two-thirds the speed of the 11/73 and having no cache, plus all of the 325/350’s incompatibilities. Taken on its merits, though, it’s a tank of a machine, a reasonably powerful workstation, and the most practical PDP-adjacent thing you can actually slap on a (large) desk.
This particular unit is one of the few artifacts I have left from a massive DEC haul almost twelve years ago. It runs PRO/VENIX, the only official DEC Unix option for the Pros, but in its less common final release (we’ll talk about versions of Venix). I don’t trust the clanky ST-506 hard drive anymore, so today we’ll convert it to solid state and double its base RAM to make it even more professional, and then play around in VENIX some for a taste of old-school classic Unix — after, of course, some history.
↫ Cameron Kaiser
Detailed, interesting, fascinating, and full of photos as always.
I just loved programing and building hardware for the PDP11 architecture.
I have 2 Dec Professional 380’s that I am in the mist of restoring. My casual observation is that DEC leveraged components that were oriented for 8 bit PC’s in these machines and the KXT11/KXJ11 products.. This led to compromises in the speed and/or different approaches and complexity to interfaces and programing. I wish we had a 32 bit successor to this architecture would have been a better competitor to Intel microprocessors.
Jerry
I have a DEC Pro 350 that works, and a DEC Pro 380 that doesn’t boot yet. I am having fun running Venix on the Xhomer emulator, Ubuntu, in a VirtualBox session.
Why is the DEC Pro significant? I think it is the only PDP-11 that came as a workstation, with graphics.