Hi all -- We've wanted to run TSS/8 on one of our PDP-8 systems at LCM+L for a long time now, and while we contemplated either (a) restoring our RF08 or (b) building an RF08 emulator, I decided it might be fun to investigate a third option: (c) modify TSS/8 to run off hardware we already have running, namely an RK05 drive.
And it /was/ fun! And seems to have been successful, as we now have TSS/8 running on our PDP-8/e. Performance is acceptable, and it seems to be stable so far. The changes I made are here: https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/cpus-pdp8 This is a fork of a codebase that Brad Parker put together a number of years back in which he did some serious work to get TSS/8 to build (amongst other things). I made use of this effort, which saved a lot of time and made building/testing my changes quite straightforward. I also modified the disk image: It's extended to 1MW (the maximum possible without modifying the filesystem code) and I ported a couple of extra programs to TSS/8 (CHEKMO and LISP). I figured some people here might also be able to take advantage of being able to run TSS/8 from RK05. I know RK8E's are pretty rare, but I'm also guessing more people have them than have working fixed-head disks :). If you do give it a try, let me know if you run into any issues or if you have any feature requests. Thanks, Josh
