I've got an older program here that appears to do just that.  I haven't
worked on it, but it comes with docs that say it was in regular use.

TU58's are gnasty beasts.  I got my 730 and both drive's head had turned
into some sort of gooey mush(Something like black pudding).  Me, not
paying huge amounts of attention(it was my first *REAL* machine) and not
knowing to be careful, tried to boot it.  It killed my boot tape. Urgh.
So now it sits in my garage, waiting for a boot tape.  I *DID* manage to
get a replacement boot drive though.  

--
Neal Rigney, PERnet Communications, (409)729-4638
neal@mail.pernet.net
"I've seen better bandwidth between two gorillas with flash cards!"

On Wed, 29 Oct 1997, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On October 29, you wrote:
> > <I was always told that about the 11/750 as well.  However, we got one that
> > <was being discarded by the chem department when I was an undergrad.  We
> > <plugged it in, turned it on, and it happily booted VMS from its disk.  Is
> > 
> > I'll bet someone put a tu58 hardware emulator or other mod in there.  If 
> > there is no tape in a stock 750 it just looks at you.
> 
>   Yes...the 750 loads microcode from the TU58 when it starts up...It
> doesn't even know the full VAX instruction set until it spins that
> tape, as I understand it.
> 
>   The TU58 is, however, a *very* simple beast.  It communicates via a
> serial line using a very simple protocol.  It'd be trivial to emulate
> that with pretty much any computer with a serial port running a little
> program.
> 
> 
>                     -Dave McGuire
>                      mcguire@neurotica.com
> 
>