A brief history.
Wondering why this old piece of software has become available on-line?

My first job was with Oracle Europe which I joined in December 1983, which was, at that time, based in Aalborg, Denmark.
In one of the rooms of the 5 room office, a PDP-11/24 was tucked away in a corner.


It's sole purpose was to support the customers of that time who did use that version, but I personally did not see it being powered up for any support related issue, most likely because of nearly every customer had moved to version 3.1.

At the end of 1984 / early 1985, the office did move to Naarden, the Netherlands, where the new office (a sort of stately house) was to be put in use.
The PDP did also move and ended up in the basement, to becomming more or less forgotten.
A year or so later, more and more space was needed for various kinds of materials and as the machine was still there (covered with a thin layer of dust), a decision was made to get rid of it.

As I did express interest in the machine, it was given to me, with the stipulation that it could not be sold to a commercial buyer.
With the machine a few RL02 disk packs came alongside, and one of the disks was the distribution kit of V2.3.

Now, over the years, my collection of PDP-11's had grown and shrunk, but that's for another time to write a story of.
The PDP-11/24 (sans the system & distribution disks) ended up in the collection of of a good friend of mine, his collection can be seen [here].

For the next story, click on the [PDP-11/70] button.

The PDP-11/70.

Early 2001, I got a message from a contact in Italy who informed me that their 'PDP setup' was going to be decommisioned and scrapped if no one wanted it.

As the initial message was not very descriptive in terms of what their 'PDP setup' was and where it was located, I asked him if he could give me some additional details as well as some pictures if that was possible.

A few days later, a few pictures came in, showing a 10 rack setup, configured as a failover system, with each machine being placed in 5 racks, and the location of all this was in Turin.


Needless to say I was very interested, as the 11/70 model was the king of the PDP's,
AND it had a blinkinglight console.

Arrangements were made, a box van was hired and off we went on route to Turin in order to collect the equipment.

Each system was configured as follows :
Rack 1 - TU16 9-track tapedrive
Rack 2 - 11/70 processor
Rack 3 - 11/70 memory box
Rack 4 - comms interface
Rack 5 - comms equipment
3x RM03 as storage sub-system
A DecWriter III (LA-120) as the console

6 racks were taken back, (2x cpu, 2x mem & 2x TU16), as well as 4 RM03 drives and several boxes of miscellaneous bits'n pieces like packs, panels, etc.

As I still had the v2.3 distribution disk, and I also had a copy of Y2K compliant distribution of RSX-11MPlus (v4.6), I made a runtime disk which also contained the V2.3 software.

Now, having a PDP-11/70 being powered up 24/7/365 is quite costly, the electricity bill would be rather staggering!



Enter 'SIMH', a freeware, well maintained piece of software able to simulate several old types of machines.

Click [here] for the latest release and related documentation.

The emulated PDP-11/70 can be reached via the browser (web based telnet client), for more information, see the '[Connect to Oracle V2.3]' button.

The original machine can be seen if you are in the neighbourhood, drop me an email in that case, see also the 'Contact' button.

Send me an email at info@oracle-v2.nl

This is a private, non commercial initiative and intended for entertainment and the preservation of historical software only.
Oracle Corporation is not involved in any way whatsoever. Logo and grid images (c)1983, 1985 Oracle Corp.

The original manual in it's single binder.


1 - SQL Language User's Guide
2 - SQL Language Reference Guide
3 - User Friendly Interface
4 - Interactive Application Facility
5 - Report Writer / Text formatter
6 - Host Language Interface
7 - Database Administrators Guide
8 - Installation Guide
9 - Error Messages

Click on a section to open it.

At the '>' prompt (you may need to press 'return' a few times), type 'HELLO ORAUSR<x>/ORAUSR<x>', where <x> is '1', '2', or '3' and click HERE to make the connection.
To connect to the demo database, use 'UFI PERSONNEL SCOTT/TIGER

A brief history of V4.1.4.
ORACLE version 4.1.4 for Digital Equipment Corporation's RSX-11M+ was released mid 1985. It was the first release of the ORACLE rdbms which did support multi version read consistency and full ACID compliancy, where V3.1.3 and V2.3 did not.

The distribution kit (a RL02 diskpack) became mine when I got ownership of the PDP-11/24 from Oracle Europe. A more detailed story about this can be read in the history section in the center column.
The kit was converted to a container file, useable under SIMH in 2010.
A problem I faced however, was that the software, altough the installation did go without problems, the initial creation of the database (ior i) was extremely slow.

For example, just the basic database initialisation took nearly a full hour, using a computer 3+GHz processor running Linux.
Not having a good understanding of the internals of RSX, I left it as it was, with the idea, 'maybe later'....


That 'maybe later' became reality during September 2024.
I had an email exchange with Johnny Billquist (yes that guy who did write the new and free to use TCP/IP stack for RSX-11M+) on something I wanted to know, and during that conversation I brought up the matter of the really bad performance of this V4.1.4 software.
Johnny kindly offered 'to have a look into it', so a copy of the container file was sent to him, not expecting much else other than 'It's going to take a while...', as he is a very busy man.

But, sometimes, little wonders do happen. As Johnny was able to make it happen, by having a deep knowledge of the internals of RSX. 3 Major improvements were made, 2 of them by just changing the task build command files, the 3rd improvement required an understanding how the low level communication mechanism between the user and the Oracle kernel task was handled.
With the help of a good disassembler, some knowledge of the internals (RSX and Oracle input from me) and several hours of putting the thinking cap on, a rewrite was done of a handfull of these low level functions.
The net effect of these improvements? Well, instead of taking nearly 1 hour to do a basic database initialisation, it now 'just' takes 10 seconds....

Where a full build of a demo database (i.e basic init, loading the catalog, the demo data, the UFI online help and the CRT definitions) took originally over 3 hours, now it is less than a minute.

For comparison, the same sequence executed on a real PDP-11/94 took nearly 20 minutes. That amount of time was what we used to see back in those days with the hardware of that era.

At the '>' prompt (you may need to press 'return' a few times), type 'HELLO ORAUSR<x>/ORAUSR<x>', where <x> is '1', '2', or '3' and click HERE to make the connection.
To connect to the demo database, use 'UFI SCOTT/TIGER

Unfortunately I don't have a papercopy of the manuals. A V5.0 set will cover most of it though.

However, if you have one of these 3 manuals who do fit in a matching cube, let me know!
BTW, as long as this request is here, I don't have the cube :(