On 2020-04-08 00:26, J. David Bryan via cctalk wrote:
Assuming that your tapes are sources, there are several folks with
operational HP 21xx/1000 computers who probably have paper-tape-reading
capability. Dumping the tape to a PC-hosted terminal emulator can
capture
the text into a host-PC file, which can then be loaded into the
simulator
via the simulated paper tape reader. So I wouldn't discard them just
yet.
They won't be discarded until my kids decide that all this crazy stuff
they inherited isn't meaningful enough to them to keep around. :)
I had retained a stack of 1/2" mag tape dumps of our company RTE system
holding all of the programs I had written over a period of twenty years
or
so. A fellow enthusiast in my area (Mike Gemeny) kindly copied them to
SIMH-compatible tape images, which I was then able to use to recreate
our
company system under simulation.
I have some old tapes from my Honeywell 66/60 GCOS days that I sometimes
wonder if I could still get dumped. No idea what is even on them any
more. I've brought up the DPS8 emulator with Multics but to be able to
actually run my old GCOS again would be a dream come true.
The RTE (Real-Time Executive) family of operating systems had a long
run at
HP -- from about 1968 through 2005 or so, with a dozen or so variants
from
simple to sophisticated. Languages supported included the HP
assembler,
FORTRAN IV, ALGOL 60 (partial), BASIC, Fortran 77, and Pascal. The
RTE-II
software kit on the HP simulator site has the assembler and FORTRAN IV
compiler preloaded, and it's easy to add the ALGOL compiler from the HP
software collection on Bitsavers. Fortran 77 and Pascal required later
versions of RTE (I intend to get kits posted for these before too
long).
Perhaps most interesting to me is a SNOBOL3 interpreter in the HP
contributed library that ran under the DOS-III operating system. It
was
written by HP Grenoble, and all of the prompts and error messages were
in
French. I used it to write a runoff clone way back when. Still have
my
"SNOBOL3 Primer" by Allen Forte (MIT Press, 1968) sitting on my
bookshelf.
Ah SNOBOL... I discovered that language shortly before graduating HS and
always wanted to play around with it but never had an instillation where
I could. ALGOL as well. Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check some of
that out too.
Thanks.
David Williams
