RSX-11M-Plus is one of the more complex systems you can run on a PDP-11. It needs a sysgen to tailor the operating system software to the system hardware, and several additional software products – layered products – can be installed on it. I’ve documented how I built my system in the pages beneath this one; almost all of that process runs on simh, not on the FPGA – mostly because the FPGA does not include something that looks like a tape drive, and most of the software comes in the form of tapes. And also, a sysgen on the FPGA still takes something like an hour.
Step 1 – Sysgen
Step 2 – configuring Decnet
Step 3 – adding Basic-Plus-2
Step 4 – adding Dibol, Pascal, C, Cobol
Step 5 – finishing up