Years ago, I stumbled across an article about emulating the PDP 11 computer.  After doing a little more research I found a package of programs called SimH, which allowed you to emulate a number of computers.  Amongst these was an emulator program for the PDP 11 system.

RSTS/E stands for Resource Sharing, Time Sharing, Extended and systems that ran it quite often had dial up connections.  Our high school had several.  The emulators I have found let you set up dial up connections using telnet.

I set up a simulation of the PDP 11/70 that I used in high school.  I could not find a version of RSTS/E that was close to V06 that I used in high school so I installed one of the later version of RSTS/E, 9.2, I believe, and patched it with the y2K patch to fix dates.  I ran that for years to play with occasionally.

I later found a version that was much closer, V7.0.07.  This I installed and patched with a Y2K patch.  Again I ran this version for years.

Since 2003 or 2004, I’ve been running these simulations, and one thing has been missing, the ability to print seamlessly, just like a real 11/70.

In this time, I have looked at another emulator, Ersatz 11, from time to time.  It is a commercial emulator for businesses who need to retain their software, but replace their hardware.  They allow hobbyist use for smaller configurations, and that works for me.

Last fall, I bought a Rosewill PCI communications card for my PC.  It has two serial ports and one parallel port.  I bought it to replace a usb serial adapter that I used to move files back and forth between my PC and either my Apple //c or my Macintosh SE.

Recently, I was reading through the documentation of Ersatz and realized, that printing was something it does.  I decided to try it out.  I started setting it up and added a little something extra.

I set it up to assign both serial ports as terminals.  My apple //c is set up as KB1: and my Mac SE as KB2: using terminal emulation software on both machines.  I also setup to assign lp0: to the windows printer using OSPRINT:.

Last Update: 15-Aug-17 Fixed spelling error and added a comma.