Re: VAX4000/300 MNS7.3 isntallation from CDROM
Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2015-08-08 13:50, Holm Tiffe wrote: Johnny Billquist wrote: [..]i Now I'll be snarky, but just for a single paragraph, Holm... :-) Did you ever actually read the full ISE Users Guide manual? Check page 3-7 to 3-12. There you actually have the manual talk about both the software write protect and the hardware write protect. In this context I believe you are going to play with the hardware write protect. Ignore my previous comment about the write protect button, as the RF31 apparently do not have one. It's all done through firmware instead. Check if there are any other parameters that looks like they might be related as well. Johnny -- The drive means that it has no wrt_prot parameter Johnny.. Ok. Too bad. That looked so very promising. :-( Trust me, I'm try to read things that are available before I ask. I'll try assuming less. I've learned about the drive internals since one of them was bad when I got the machine, none of them was booting something, had tried that first and so I ran erase and test utils in the drive. That was months before now. I know that the drive hat an error in his logs but I've cleared that error after running the drive tests and exerciser as described. (I think tere is a rubber bumper in the drive that glued on the head assembly and with google I found the solution) There was no time previously to try to install VMS. Ok. Understood. The rubber bumper thing is something that exists in several drives. Search for sticky heads and similar phrases if you want to see. No the thing is that I know almost nothing about VMS (and RSX11), I'm a unix guy as you know. Yeah... But it's fun to learn. :-) People on the net organized almost w/o any effort from me that I got this VAX4000/300 to give it a good home, now I have some free time and I'm trying to install it after cleaning and repairing that !§$%%/%i!! PSU. Good work so far then. In the meantime as I write this I have run the drvexr task for 20 minutes: 4188 operations completed. 75150 LBN blocks (512 bytes) read. 25050 LBN blocks (512 bytes) written. 81900 DBN blocks (512 bytes) read. 27300 DBN blocks (512 bytes) written. 75150 LBN blocks (512 bytes) read. 0 bytes in error (soft). 0 uncorrectable ECC errors. Complete. Seems like the drive is working fine. Have you an VMS mount command handy that I should try? Did you try the commands mentioned in the manual? /OVER=ID is good to make MOUNT succeed independent of what labels are on the disk. /NOASSIST to make mount complete directly instead of sending a request to an operator. /WRITE or /NOWRITE for that part. /FOREIGN to mount disks that do not have a VMS filesystem on them. After that, I'd try to just read/write to the disk from VMS. Either it works, and you are happy. Or it fails, at which point you will have a good VMS error log to read from to find more details on what the problem is. VMS can also exercise the disk and analyze it. Johnny Johnny I thinks it's time to clear some things about me a little bit up for you. Most people here think that I'm sort of a hero in repairing electronics and I can do some programming too. That's from what I get my living from. I'm my own company, repairing electronic stuff (no, no TVs and suchi, htat I'm doing only for myself) developing controller boards for industrial customers and do some programming in assembler and C on microcontrollers. I have rent a server in a computing centre and I'm hosting approx 80 customers with web an mail services. I'm the contractor for firewalling in the local power company here. But I'm a better repair person then a programmer at all. ..so I get my living, the wrong way to get rich at all..but.. Whey I say here that I have some spaer time to play with out old geriatric computers then this timeframe is really small. That is so when I try to port NetBSD to a VAX-ISA Card (and fail) and it is so when I try to install that unknown to me VMS on an old VAX. When I say I can hear you laughing then I think I know why. I know your way tho advise me in some things..you are tend to say RTFM. That's not totally wrong, and I have approx 3 meters of some VAX documentation here and havend read a single bit from the, but I'm not that new with googling some stuff. The problem at my site is the small amount of time that I can spend for that. I'm reading how a install should be done...but now there are some differences where I don't have an explantation for. That's the moment where I'm asking PPL like you. And then an answer linke type in backup/image/verify disk:source/save destinationdisk: is much more helpful to me as the hint to the documentation ..that I'm possibly read alerady.. I'm 52 years old and I have forgotten what the manual says at the beginning when I'm at end if I don't use the learned stuff. When I should read the entire Manual the left over time for
Re: Solution was: VAX4000/300 MNS7.3 isntallation from CDROM
Peter Coghlan wrote: Holm Tiffe wrote: It seems that the disk has some problems, or better the two RF31 disks. If I try to install VMS on the disks there is some ratteling and data where copied to them, after a while I get those infamous volume is not software enabled errors. There are no problems detected from the dssi internal support programms or their logs... There might be something in the VMS error log: $ ANALYZE /ERROR_LOG I've erased the disk dia0 again with the dssi tools since that overwrites every sector o nthe disk (for data security reasons) and I get no error. Now hours later I've tried to install again. (backup/image/verify dua3:vms073.b/save disk0$dia0:) The backup starts to shuffle data and then bails out with that: %PAA0, Port has Closed Virtual Circuit - REMOTE SIDE DISK0 As far as I know, DSSI can be used as a VAX cluster interconnect and DSSI disks behave in similar ways to nodes in a VAX cluster. Therefore, it may be more correct to think of your DSSI disks as remotely served disks on another node instead of locally attached disks. In the case of a cluster which is using ethernet as a VAX cluster interconnect, error messages similar to: %PEA0, Port has Closed Virtual Circuit normally indicate ethernet media problems causing difficulty with cluster connections. PEA0 is the port emulator device where the ethernet is emulating a real CI cluster interconnect - coaxial cables and a transformer. Perhaps your PAA0 errors indicate some sort of errors with the DSSI connections rather than the disk media? There should be more details on this in the VMS error log. Regards, Peter Coghlan. Yes Peter..that was some of my toughts also. A problem with the communication with that disk subsystem, the client in the subsystem has closed the connection.. Interestingly one fo the disks worked (RF71) to other two not and that with an identical error (RF31). Both disk passed the oboard diagnostics w/o any error or warning..so wat the heck is going on here..? I've decided to pull the disk out of the machine and test every single disk alone. while doing that I saw a small Module with Voltage regulators and 4 Electrolytics sitting between the connectors on the backplane. This module is hold from a single screw, after loosen the screw (Attention ..wants to fall down in to the machine!) one can pull the module out of the connectors. I've done a quick check with my ESR tester..the Electrolytics where all totaly dry! (4 pcs Nichicon 100µF 35V). I know Nichicon is making good electrolytics but why the heck they are using fish sauce as electrolyte? :-) They stunk while desoldering. Replaced the 4 condensers, put the disks back in, booted from the cd and bingo ... no. The disk was offline, put that button in, rebooted, backup..verify run..done! That infamous Error is gone away... Don#t know what the Voltage regulators there are doing, possibly they supply an active Terminator or they supply power to the disks... Now I can do what I wanted todo 2 days before... Thanks to all that helped! Holm -- Technik Service u. Handel Tiffe, www.tsht.de, Holm Tiffe, Freiberger Straße 42, 09600 Oberschöna, USt-Id: DE253710583 www.tsht.de, i...@tsht.de, Fax +49 3731 74200, Mobil: 0172 8790 741
Re: Classic programming
And one should not forget Algol. 60 or 68? (and, for that matter, PL/1 should probably be considered an unsung inspiration for C as it was the implementation language for Multics in which Bell labs was a partner and must have inspired at least the name for Unix)
Re: Qbus split ID?
On 2015-03-18 19:15, Noel Chiappa wrote: From: Johnny Billquist One more thing to check this summer... OK, if you can, that would really be great; if either i) it's still together, or ii) there are pictures, it would fill some of the key knowledge gaps. In particular, i) what kind of backplane is it plugged into, and ii) what is the UNIBUS edge connector on the card connected to... Wow. This took me some time to get back to, and also find the mail thread. Anyway, I can now shed some more light here. To recap, we had multiple discussions/arguments about a memory expansion option for the 11/34, where lots of other people claimed that the Enable34 added memory, but that it was not addressable in the regular sense, and you mostly could use it in a bank switched way, and possibly DMA to it. I, on the other hand, claimed that it worked just like normal memory, and essentially expanded the 11/34 to a 22-bit addressing machine. Making it more or less the same as an 11/24. Turns out I understood/remembered it right, but was wrong about the product. The 11/34 that I played with did not have a product from Enable. So I really cannot comment on the Enable34, and I do not have any documentation on it. The product my 11/34 have came from Systime, and it do expand the 11/34 to 22 bit full addressing. The PAR registers are expanded to 16 bits, MMR3 gets some additional bits, and you get a Unibus map. The solution is one card in the CPU backplane. In addition, a few wires needs to be changed on the backplane, there is a cable from a CPU card to the Systime card, and a few modifications required on the 11/34 CPU itself. And then there is a separate box connected from the Systime card, which holds all the memory. Once you have installed the Systime option, you will have an 11/34 with 22-bit addressing. From a software point of view, the easiest is to tell any OS that you have an 11/24 instead, and everything just works. We still do have the manuals, even though I'm not sure where the hardware is anymore. It would take some work to scan them, and I don't have the time for that at the moment. I wonder, have anyone else but me ever seen/used this option? Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol
DEC RX02-PA?
I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? Thanks! -- Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
Options, options, options... DEC was was good at options. -- Will On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se wrote: On 2015-08-09 18:14, William Donzelli wrote: The pedestal RX02s are around, but pretty rare. I think they were part of a PDP-8 based word processor (VT78?), and/or part of the smaller PDT11 systems. You can easily google pictures of the VT78, and it has the same two RX01 (or if it is RX02) side by side as you could expect elsewhere. The PDT-11/150 at least have drives that resembles the ones on ebay, but the cabinet is different (if you can even say the PDT-11/150 have a cabinet). No, the ebay listing is still a weird beast, to say the least. Johnny -- Will On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se wrote: On 2015-08-09 17:48, Ben Sinclair wrote: I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? That is definitely not an RX02 in the common sense of the word. I would like to see a picture where you can see that Digital sticker in a larger context, so I can see that it really sits on that cabinet. The whole cabinet do not even look in the style of DEC cabinets. Very strange beast. But who knows. DEC might have built some off one-off or something for a special purpose or customer. (Not to mention that RX02 is not a computer to start with...) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 8/9/2015 12:36 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote: Good OS-es allowed an operator to mount tapes for his next few jobs, without paying attention to paper labels and have the OS automatically locate and assign tapes to the proper job. Can UNIX do that? --Chuck Seems dangerous to me: duplicate data set names on different tapes would confuse it (plus, if the DSN is long, the entire DSN does not actually appear in the tape label). I worked with OS/360 and MVS in my career and we never did anything like that with it. Certainly one could imagine writing a process in Unix (or most any OS, for that matter) to do something like that where a separate process managed the tape drives, and then processes could connect to it to ask for tape data based on the label. I just can't imagine anyone WANTING to do that. JRJ
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 8/8/15 9:16 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 08/08/2015 08:14 PM, Jay Jaeger wrote:
If anyone is interested, I have code for a Linux SCSI tape to
AWSTAPE program, and a program that translates aws format to a raw
byte stream. Not sure if I have one that translates to the SimH .tap
format, though. GNU C.
I've got a Linux utility to translate SIMH .tap to raw binary, if that's
interesting to anyone. I would have thought that such utilities existed
already.
--Chuck
this bursts a tape into raw sequentially numbered files
#include stdio.h
FILE *fp;
main()
{
unsigned int len, len2;
unsigned int i;
unsigned int filenum = 0;
char fname[20];
sprintf(fname,%05d,filenum++);
fp = fopen(fname,w);
do{
len = getchar();
if(feof(stdin)) exit(1);
len = len | (getchar()8);
len = len | (getchar()16);
len = len | (getchar()24);
if(len == -1){
fprintf(stderr,65535 byte record in file %d\n,filenum);
getchar();getchar();getchar();getchar();
continue;
}
if(len == 0){
fprintf(stderr,Tape Mark\n);
fclose(fp);
sprintf(fname,%05d,filenum++);
fp = fopen(fname,w);
continue;
}
for(i = len; i; i--)
fputc(getchar(), fp);
len2= getchar();
len2= len2 | (getchar()8);
len2= len2 | (getchar()16);
len2= len2 | (getchar()24);
if(len != len2){
fprintf(stderr, front and back lengths differ!\n);
exit(1);
}
} while(!feof(stdin));
}
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 08/09/2015 10:45 AM, Jay Jaeger wrote: Seems dangerous to me: duplicate data set names on different tapes would confuse it (plus, if the DSN is long, the entire DSN does not actually appear in the tape label). I worked with OS/360 and MVS in my career and we never did anything like that with it. So you'd trust your job to a 9-5 operator who really didn't care what the machine was doing to make tape assignments? Wow. Good thing that tapes have write-enable rings. --Chuck
RE: Classic programming
-Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Brent Hilpert Sent: 09 August 2015 19:10 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Classic programming On 2015-Aug-09, at 10:40 AM, Robert Jarratt wrote: -Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul Koning Sent: 09 August 2015 18:22 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Classic programming On Aug 9, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Robert Jarratt robert.jarr...@ntlworld.com wrote: ... I used to like Algol68, and got to play with an implementation called Algol68C on a DECSYSTEM-20 in the late 70s. Occasionally I ask if anyone has got the media for it, I still live in hope. I think there are some other implementations around, I should make the effort to try one some time. There was a quite good Algol 68 for the CDC 6000 series. Maybe I should get one of those then :-) There are also oddities like an Algol 68 interpreter (not compiler) written in Algol 60. And there is an open source Algol 68 around today - algol68g. I think that is the one I was thinking of. I should give it a go. There was also AlgolW, supported on MTS. As MTS was being mentioned earlier I was going to ask if anyone knew whether the AlgolW compiler was included in the available distribution. I believe that its included, but I haven't tried it. Dave G4UGM
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
Good OS-es allowed an operator to mount tapes for his next few jobs, without paying attention to paper labels and have the OS automatically locate and assign tapes to the proper job. Even the old Operators Exec (and thus George 1 and 2) could do that on the ICL 1900 - I think it was referred-to as AVR (Automatic Volume Recognition) I took it so much for granted that I did not even think of mentioning it in the operational requirement for the replacement system. Quite a shock to discover its absence in GCOS on the Level 66. (The reason for its absence on big multi-tasking machines was probably to do with the scheduling on such being done by the OS, not the operators. Typically there was an extra console by the tape decks which told the operators which tapes to load for the next couple of jobs and didn't even schedule the job until the appropriate device was ready.)
Re: Classic programming
On Sun, 9 Aug 2015, Douglas Taylor wrote: I've watched this thread with interest because I am struggling with getting up to speed using Microsoft Visual C++ version 1.5, which I think was their first IDE. ??!? December 1993 1.0 was February 1993 Do you really mean first Microsoft IDE?? Howzbout QUICKC? (October 1987) or first C++? or first Windoze? (QuickC for Windows September 1991) or first Windoze C++? When I taught C, I forced (mean teacher) my students to do at least one program using a command line compiler (suggested: GCC or PersonalC (DeSmet)), and to do at least one program using an IDE (suggested: TurboC, quickC, VisualC++, or Microsoft C/C++). I was even so mean that I made them create a source file AND an executable file, and even check the DIRectory to confirm that the executable was newer than the source.
Re: Classic programming
On 2015-Aug-09, at 10:40 AM, Robert Jarratt wrote: -Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul Koning Sent: 09 August 2015 18:22 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Classic programming On Aug 9, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Robert Jarratt robert.jarr...@ntlworld.com wrote: ... I used to like Algol68, and got to play with an implementation called Algol68C on a DECSYSTEM-20 in the late 70s. Occasionally I ask if anyone has got the media for it, I still live in hope. I think there are some other implementations around, I should make the effort to try one some time. There was a quite good Algol 68 for the CDC 6000 series. Maybe I should get one of those then :-) There are also oddities like an Algol 68 interpreter (not compiler) written in Algol 60. And there is an open source Algol 68 around today — algol68g. I think that is the one I was thinking of. I should give it a go. There was also AlgolW, supported on MTS. As MTS was being mentioned earlier I was going to ask if anyone knew whether the AlgolW compiler was included in the available distribution.
Re: Classic programming
From: Eric Christopherson people who like to program in languages or language implementations or libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course, if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc. From: Sean Conner My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get custom system calls to use. ... [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool. Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...) Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there. As to who actually did do EMACS, it was a cast of characters, and I wasn't enough part of it to know who should be listed. RMS was, of course, primus inter pares, but there were others. E.g. I remember Gene Cicarelli did some stuff. There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc - it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene did that. Noel
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
On 2015-08-09 18:14, William Donzelli wrote: The pedestal RX02s are around, but pretty rare. I think they were part of a PDP-8 based word processor (VT78?), and/or part of the smaller PDT11 systems. You can easily google pictures of the VT78, and it has the same two RX01 (or if it is RX02) side by side as you could expect elsewhere. The PDT-11/150 at least have drives that resembles the ones on ebay, but the cabinet is different (if you can even say the PDT-11/150 have a cabinet). No, the ebay listing is still a weird beast, to say the least. Johnny -- Will On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se wrote: On 2015-08-09 17:48, Ben Sinclair wrote: I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? That is definitely not an RX02 in the common sense of the word. I would like to see a picture where you can see that Digital sticker in a larger context, so I can see that it really sits on that cabinet. The whole cabinet do not even look in the style of DEC cabinets. Very strange beast. But who knows. DEC might have built some off one-off or something for a special purpose or customer. (Not to mention that RX02 is not a computer to start with...) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol
Re: Classic programming
On 08/09/2015 08:31 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: From: Johnny Billquist And one should not forget Algol. IIRC, Algol is mentioned in the paper I linked to. Of course, Algol's DNA is in pretty much every procedural language ever created since it was. It seems everyone has forgotten JOVIAL (1959). PL/I was remarkable for the fact that it's the language that nobody involved with the language really wanted.I do remember a few stories about that told to me by a fellow who worked on COMBTRAN and steadfastly refused to be involved with said PL/I project. A couple of years later, one of my compatriots was involved with coming up with the ANSI standard for the thing. His view was not much different that my other friend's. --Chuck
Re: Classic programming
On Aug 9, 2015, at 1:40 PM, Robert Jarratt robert.jarr...@ntlworld.com wrote: -Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul Koning Sent: 09 August 2015 18:22 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Classic programming On Aug 9, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Robert Jarratt robert.jarr...@ntlworld.com wrote: ... I used to like Algol68, and got to play with an implementation called Algol68C on a DECSYSTEM-20 in the late 70s. Occasionally I ask if anyone has got the media for it, I still live in hope. I think there are some other implementations around, I should make the effort to try one some time. There was a quite good Algol 68 for the CDC 6000 series. Maybe I should get one of those then :-) Those are a bit hard to find, but there’s always DtCyber, the emulator. paul
RE: Classic programming
-Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul Koning Sent: 09 August 2015 19:00 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Classic programming On Aug 9, 2015, at 1:40 PM, Robert Jarratt robert.jarr...@ntlworld.com wrote: -Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul Koning Sent: 09 August 2015 18:22 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Classic programming On Aug 9, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Robert Jarratt robert.jarr...@ntlworld.com wrote: ... I used to like Algol68, and got to play with an implementation called Algol68C on a DECSYSTEM-20 in the late 70s. Occasionally I ask if anyone has got the media for it, I still live in hope. I think there are some other implementations around, I should make the effort to try one some time. There was a quite good Algol 68 for the CDC 6000 series. Maybe I should get one of those then :-) Those are a bit hard to find, but there’s always DtCyber, the emulator. And I think I may not have enough 13A sockets to run one of those in my house anyway :-) I didn't know there was an emulator (never looked to be honest). I will add it to my to-do list, but my knowledge of these machines is absolutely zero. So getting something going might be a challenge, especially as it looks like I would also need to find some OS media somewhere as well. I do recall learning about the theoretical architecture of the scoreboard though when I was at University. The University had, iirc, a CDC Cyber 17something, which I used for one of the programming courses (Pascal I think), but I disliked it having come from using a DECSYSTEM-20. Now that I think about it, I did do a course on Algol68 at University (although I knew the language already, having learned it on the DEC machine), and it may well have been on that Cyber. I can't remember the dialect though, may have been Algol68R. Regards Rob
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 08/09/2015 11:27 AM, Dave G4UGM wrote: If you had a tape master file then typically that had the same dataset name on the master in and out But obviously, not the same VSN... There's (potentially) a lot of information in a set of labels, particularly if any of the user labels are used. See, for example, this CERN document: https://it-dep-fio-ds.web.cern.ch/it-dep-fio-ds/documentation/tapedrive/labels.html --Chuck
Re: Classic programming
Have you tried Plan 9? It's like a breath of fresh air ... :O Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Noel Chiappa j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote: From: Eric Christopherson people who like to program in languages or language implementations or libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course, if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc. From: Sean Conner My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get custom system calls to use. ... [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool. Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...) Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there. As to who actually did do EMACS, it was a cast of characters, and I wasn't enough part of it to know who should be listed. RMS was, of course, primus inter pares, but there were others. E.g. I remember Gene Cicarelli did some stuff. There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc - it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene did that. Noel
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
DEC did sell a version of the BA23 that was intended to be used just as an expansion peripherals cabinet. You shouldn't have any problems putting HH devices in BA23 bays (so long as you have the appropriate interfaces to drive them) but you may need i.e. 3.5 to 5.25 bracket to attach to the BA23 sleds, and you'll have (cosmetic) blank space on top after putting a HH device in a FH bay. I imagine you'd have to make a special bracket to mount a TZ30/RX33 over-under in one of the 5.25 bays in the BA23 but it could certainly be done ... No such factory configuration exists AFAIK... I think the BA23 was fairly superseded by the S-box when those peripherals hit the market. Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 12:57 PM, Douglas Taylor dj.tayl...@comcast.net wrote: On 8/9/2015 11:48 AM, Ben Sinclair wrote: I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? Thanks! This seller (who has a bizarre sounding name) also has a pair of RX33 floppies for sale. The mounting hardware is interesting, was there ever something like that for the BA23? I always wanted to mount a TZ30 and RX33 drive in place of the RX50 drive, was that ever an option?
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
Looked briefly and my suspicion is that it's genuinely an RX02 ... or most of the major guts of one ... repackaged into a much larger and uglier cabinet, LOL. There's a good chance it is what it says it is ... the exposed control board in Pic 2 looks basically identical to that in my (standard cabinet) RX02. You're right though, odd cabinet, never seen it before. Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 11:48 AM, Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com wrote: I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? Thanks! -- Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com
Re: Classic programming
Yes, *ALGOLW is included and working in the D6.0 MTS tapes. Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 2:25 PM, Dave G4UGM dave.g4...@gmail.com wrote: -Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Brent Hilpert Sent: 09 August 2015 19:10 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Classic programming On 2015-Aug-09, at 10:40 AM, Robert Jarratt wrote: -Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Paul Koning Sent: 09 August 2015 18:22 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Classic programming On Aug 9, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Robert Jarratt robert.jarr...@ntlworld.com wrote: ... I used to like Algol68, and got to play with an implementation called Algol68C on a DECSYSTEM-20 in the late 70s. Occasionally I ask if anyone has got the media for it, I still live in hope. I think there are some other implementations around, I should make the effort to try one some time. There was a quite good Algol 68 for the CDC 6000 series. Maybe I should get one of those then :-) There are also oddities like an Algol 68 interpreter (not compiler) written in Algol 60. And there is an open source Algol 68 around today - algol68g. I think that is the one I was thinking of. I should give it a go. There was also AlgolW, supported on MTS. As MTS was being mentioned earlier I was going to ask if anyone knew whether the AlgolW compiler was included in the available distribution. I believe that its included, but I haven't tried it. Dave G4UGM
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
It looks like it's from a VT-278 setup, sometimes called the 'DECMATE 1. I had two complete setups, and now have one left. With the VT-278, it will run OS-278, COS-300, and WPS-8 (My systems were both WPS-8's, but I have a copy of VT-278 somewhere in my physical 'archives'). BR, Dave Mahoney Straight-8 2 '8/e's (one RXO1 based, one RX02 based) ASR-33, ASR-35, VT-101, VT-102 VT-278 'Bits' of all. - Original Message - From: Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts cctalk@classiccmp.org Sent: Sunday, August 9, 2015 11:48:56 AM Subject: DEC RX02-PA? I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? Thanks! -- Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com
Re: PDP-12 Restoration at the RICM
When we first powered up the PDP-12 the main fuse for the VR12 display blew. A replacement fuse did the same. We thought that the brown goo in the bottom of the chassis had leaked from the high-voltage power supply, and the high-voltage power supply is directly connected to the input, so that was the first suspect. We bench tested the high-voltage power supply using a Variac on the input. With a 10VAC input there was no output at all. Increasing the input voltage did not change the missing output voltage. I hate to mention this but... The two capacitors in the voltage-doubler circuit are connected in series between the output lead and ground. We connected a current limited lab power supply to the output lead and ground and slowly increased the voltage while watching the current draw. With the voltage stable the current draw was a few microamps. We increased the output voltage of the power supply to the 64VDC max, disconnected the power supply, and measured the voltage across the caps. It very slowly decreased, so maybe the caps were OK. We reconnected the Variac to the input and with 10VAC the high-voltage power supply had a 1000VDC output. We put 10x 500kOhm resistors in series across the output and increased the Variac voltage. By measuring the voltage across one resistor we could see that the output was more than 10,000VDC. The resistors started smoking so we knew that we had a lot of high-voltage available. So, once again the magic of reforming capacitors saves another piece of equipment. -- Michael Thompson
RE: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
-Original Message- From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Chuck Guzis Sent: 09 August 2015 20:40 To: gene...@classiccmp.org; discuss...@classiccmp.org:On-Topic and Off- Topic Posts cctalk@classiccmp.org Subject: Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility On 08/09/2015 11:27 AM, Dave G4UGM wrote: If you had a tape master file then typically that had the same dataset name on the master in and out But obviously, not the same VSN... There's (potentially) a lot of information in a set of labels, particularly if any of the user labels are used. See, for example, this CERN document: https://it-dep-fio-ds.web.cern.ch/it-dep-fio- ds/documentation/tapedrive/labels.html --Chuck On the Honeywell we had a Tape Management System that managed the tapes. All the tapes were filed by tape number, and the system knew which file was on which tape. It would tell the operators which tape number to mount. It would also manage the scratch pool of expired tapes and tell them which tapes to have ready for new outputs. It also managed off site storage. We trusted it and never removed a write ring. If you mounted a tape with current data the system read the label and dis-mounted the tape Dave Wade
Re: Classic programming
On 8/9/2015 11:22 AM, Sean Caron wrote: Have you tried Plan 9? It's like a breath of fresh air ... :O Best, Sean But alas almost all the classic machines endup being a IBM 360 or a PDP-10. I don't think plan 9 was written for them. Ben. PS: checks Google to see how much memory PL/I had to compile in ... 44Kb version 1.
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
Pete Turnbull wrote: On 09/08/2015 18:14, Sean Caron wrote: DEC did sell a version of the BA23 that was intended to be used just as an expansion peripherals cabinet. You shouldn't have any problems putting HH devices in BA23 bays (so long as you have the appropriate interfaces to drive them) but you may need i.e. 3.5 to 5.25 bracket to attach to the BA23 sleds, and you'll have (cosmetic) blank space on top after putting a HH device in a FH bay. I imagine you'd have to make a special bracket to mount a TZ30/RX33 over-under in one of the 5.25 bays in the BA23 but it could certainly be done ... No such factory configuration exists AFAIK If a TZ30 has the same mounting holes as a 5.25 disk drive, it's doable. There's an official DEC mounting kit to mount 2 x RX33 where you'd normally find an RX50 in a BA23/BA123. It's basically two side plates, to hold the upper and lower drives together. There is a very simple solution to mount 2 * RX33 floppy drives if you have an old RX50 which no longer works - or you at least can borrow the outer shell from a working RX50. There is sufficient room when 2 * RX33 floppy drives are stuffed into an empty RX50 shell to hold the edge connectors along with a Y power splitter. Then use a few bolts to make the empty shell rigid by attaching the now FULL RX50 shell (naturally with the 2 * RX33 drives inside) to both RX33 drives plus attaching the original black plastic sled to the bottom in its original location. I suggest that you first test everything out to make sure that the connections are working before placing the 2 * RX33 drives inside the empty RX50 shell. Once finished, the 2 * RX33 drives look very much like a dual RX50, but the handles to lock in the floppy media give the situation away on close inspection. ALSO, it seems best to mount both RX33 drives right-side UP. The lower handle works much more easily that way. I still have my dual RX33 set-up in this manner. The only difference is that the cable ends in two edge connectors rather than the header used for the RX50. So it does work. This probably works since the RQDX3 is set to handle the dual RX50, so having 2 * RX33 floppy drives is equivalent. NOTE that the RX33 will work ONLY with the RQDX3, not the RQDX1 or RQDX2. In addition, with the RX33 drive, DEC actually supports the command to perform a Low Level Format which was NEVER possible with the RX50 drive with DEC hardware in a PDP-11 Qbus system. Under RT-11, just FORMAT DU0: As far as 1 * RX33 and a TZ30, I imagine that would also be fairly easy as well, although I don't know how much clearance is available inside the empty RX50 shell for the cable to the TZ30 tape drive. If someone actually attempts to place both the RX33 and the TZ30 inside the RX50 shell, please let us know what happens. Jerome Fine
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 08/09/2015 01:25 PM, Dave G4UGM wrote: On the Honeywell we had a Tape Management System that managed the tapes. All the tapes were filed by tape number, and the system knew which file was on which tape. It would tell the operators which tape number to mount. It would also manage the scratch pool of expired tapes and tell them which tapes to have ready for new outputs. It also managed off site storage. We trusted it and never removed a write ring. If you mounted a tape with current data the system read the label and dis-mounted the tape I think that most large mainframe OSs eventually had a similar feature. When you had operators who were barely trained, it was best to leave it to the system. On the CDC 60x and 65x, my tapes never had a write ring in them (what else are you going to play ring-toss with while waiting for your job to complete?). I always kept a few cards in my shirt pocked to stick behind the mounted reel and trip the write-enable mechanism (which latched). When the autoloading 66x drives came in, part of my world disappeared. I've never tried to see if that trick works on minicomputer reel-to-reel drives. --Chuck
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
If it was a salvageable set of RX02s, it would have been nice to have! Too bad he pulled the listing. On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Pete Turnbull p...@dunnington.plus.com wrote: On 09/08/2015 18:14, Sean Caron wrote: DEC did sell a version of the BA23 that was intended to be used just as an expansion peripherals cabinet. You shouldn't have any problems putting HH devices in BA23 bays (so long as you have the appropriate interfaces to drive them) but you may need i.e. 3.5 to 5.25 bracket to attach to the BA23 sleds, and you'll have (cosmetic) blank space on top after putting a HH device in a FH bay. I imagine you'd have to make a special bracket to mount a TZ30/RX33 over-under in one of the 5.25 bays in the BA23 but it could certainly be done ... No such factory configuration exists AFAIK If a TZ30 has the same mounting holes as a 5.25 disk drive, it's doable. There's an official DEC mounting kit to mount 2 x RX33 where you'd normally find an RX50 in a BA23/BA123. It's basically two side plates, to hold the upper and lower drives together. -- Pete Pete Turnbull -- Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
I've seen / had them before. the top looks like it is the one for the MINC box, On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com wrote: I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? Thanks! -- Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com
RE: PDP-12 Restoration at the RICM
We reconnected the Variac to the input and with 10VAC the high-voltage power supply had a 1000VDC output. We put 10x 500kOhm resistors in series across the output and increased the Variac voltage. By measuring the voltage across one resistor we could see that the output was more than 10,000VDC. The resistors started smoking so we knew that we had a lot of high-voltage available. Wait a second! Are you sure those capacitors are electrolytics, because I am almost sure they are oil-filled paper types. I have never seen an electrolytic with a voltage rating of 5000V or so. And they would not be very high capacitance in that circuit. I've worked on the VR14, and the EHT module in that is similar (transformer + voltage doubler. It's an oil-filled can, the capacitors are certainly not electrolytics. Incidentally the oil may well be polychlorinated biphenyl based, if you are worried about such things (FWIW a friend who worked on _large_ transformers told me the amount in a VR14 EHT can is not going to do me any harm unless I do something very silly with it. Just wash your hands well if you get any on them). So, once again the magic of reforming capacitors saves another piece of equipment. You can't reform non-electrolytic capacitors. More likely they are leaky paper types and you are drying them out. -tony
Re: Classic programming
On Aug 9, 2015, at 2:46 PM, Noel Chiappa j...@mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote: From: Paul Koning Algol 60, that is. It was used as the inspiration by just about everything that followed I've just remembered that the Algol (probably Algol-60, but the manual doesn't say) interpreter used for the programming languages course at MIT was adapted from the Delphi (a homebrew PDP-11 OS used at MIT) version, to a version that would run under Unix V6. So it should be runnable under any PDP-11 emulator. There’s DECUS ALGOL, which is essentially a PDP-11 version of Burroughs Extended Algol. It generates bytecode which even looks somewhat like B5500 machine code. I still have a copy, though I need to do some work to find the correct sources and build procedure for the runtime support code. paul
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 2015-08-09 19:54, ANDY HOLT wrote: Good OS-es allowed an operator to mount tapes for his next few jobs, without paying attention to paper labels and have the OS automatically locate and assign tapes to the proper job. Even the old Operators Exec (and thus George 1 and 2) could do that on the ICL 1900 - I think it was referred-to as AVR (Automatic Volume Recognition) I took it so much for granted that I did not even think of mentioning it in the operational requirement for the replacement system. Quite a shock to discover its absence in GCOS on the Level 66. (The reason for its absence on big multi-tasking machines was probably to do with the scheduling on such being done by the OS, not the operators. Typically there was an extra console by the tape decks which told the operators which tapes to load for the next couple of jobs and didn't even schedule the job until the appropriate device was ready.) You should look at the operator interface in TOPS-20... It's a marvel of beauty in this area. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol
Re: Classic programming
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 10:19 AM, Paul Koning paulkon...@comcast.net wrote: Right. And further tweaked by myself, also at DEC (for RSTS/E), though I don’t believe that version was sent back to DECUS. Neat! I'm a big fan of RSTS/E, are you able to make your tweaked version available?
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
On 8/9/2015 8:01 PM, Jerome H. Fine wrote: Pete Turnbull wrote: On 09/08/2015 18:14, Sean Caron wrote: DEC did sell a version of the BA23 that was intended to be used just as an expansion peripherals cabinet. You shouldn't have any problems putting HH devices in BA23 bays (so long as you have the appropriate interfaces to drive them) but you may need i.e. 3.5 to 5.25 bracket to attach to the BA23 sleds, and you'll have (cosmetic) blank space on top after putting a HH device in a FH bay. I imagine you'd have to make a special bracket to mount a TZ30/RX33 over-under in one of the 5.25 bays in the BA23 but it could certainly be done ... No such factory configuration exists AFAIK If a TZ30 has the same mounting holes as a 5.25 disk drive, it's doable. There's an official DEC mounting kit to mount 2 x RX33 where you'd normally find an RX50 in a BA23/BA123. It's basically two side plates, to hold the upper and lower drives together. There is a very simple solution to mount 2 * RX33 floppy drives if you have an old RX50 which no longer works - or you at least can borrow the outer shell from a working RX50. There is sufficient room when 2 * RX33 floppy drives are stuffed into an empty RX50 shell to hold the edge connectors along with a Y power splitter. Then use a few bolts to make the empty shell rigid by attaching the now FULL RX50 shell (naturally with the 2 * RX33 drives inside) to both RX33 drives plus attaching the original black plastic sled to the bottom in its original location. I suggest that you first test everything out to make sure that the connections are working before placing the 2 * RX33 drives inside the empty RX50 shell. Once finished, the 2 * RX33 drives look very much like a dual RX50, but the handles to lock in the floppy media give the situation away on close inspection. ALSO, it seems best to mount both RX33 drives right-side UP. The lower handle works much more easily that way. I still have my dual RX33 set-up in this manner. The only difference is that the cable ends in two edge connectors rather than the header used for the RX50. So it does work. This probably works since the RQDX3 is set to handle the dual RX50, so having 2 * RX33 floppy drives is equivalent. NOTE that the RX33 will work ONLY with the RQDX3, not the RQDX1 or RQDX2. In addition, with the RX33 drive, DEC actually supports the command to perform a Low Level Format which was NEVER possible with the RX50 drive with DEC hardware in a PDP-11 Qbus system. Under RT-11, just FORMAT DU0: As far as 1 * RX33 and a TZ30, I imagine that would also be fairly easy as well, although I don't know how much clearance is available inside the empty RX50 shell for the cable to the TZ30 tape drive. If someone actually attempts to place both the RX33 and the TZ30 inside the RX50 shell, please let us know what happens. Jerome Fine Interesting solution, the reason I asked is because I have a floor mounted BA23 PDP11 and a RQZX1 controller which will run a floppy, disk and tape. I think it will run a TZ30 tape, haven't tried yet.
RE: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
I always kept a few cards in my shirt pocked to stick behind the mounted reel and trip the write-enable mechanism (which latched). When the autoloading 66x drives came in, part of my world disappeared. I've never tried to see if that trick works on minicomputer reel-to-reel drives. It should do. The few minicomputer magtape drives I've been inside have a solenoid on the write-enable pin. If it is pushed in part way, a microswtich operated and the solenoid pulls it in further to keep it away from the write enable ring. Otherwise, I think there would be tremendous wear on said ring. -tony
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 08/09/2015 09:54 PM, Marc Verdiell wrote: Well, Chuck, thanks a bunch, this is very useful and quite difficult code to write from scratch. How does one compile for DOS by the way (I have to admit I am too young to have ever tried), and get a copy of MSC 8.00C. Is the DOS compiler buried in some part of Visual Studio? I have some old versions dating back from Windows 95 time, when it was called Visual Studio 97... Marc I believe it was tossed into Visual Studio 97 as a separate CD (not part of the usual packet of Visual Basic, 32-bit C++, Visual J++, etc.) So you probably already have it. I don't install the MS-specitic stuff (e.g. COM), just the compiler binaries and basic libraries and include files. It does require some DOS extender support (e.g. run it on Win9x or install HXDOS which will also work). I'd be surprised if there weren't a free version wandering around the web; sort of like MASM 6.x. With a little tweaking, almost any C that can compile to real mode (e.g. Borland C) should be able to handle it. The model that I compiled for is the Compact one (64K data, 64K code). It should not be very difficult to alter for Windows 32-bit cli use making use of WNASPI32--I just haven't had a need for it. Linux sg might also be an option--SCSI CDBs don't change. --Chuck --Chuck
Re: Lucas-Lehmer Test (Was Classic programming)
Are you aware of faster-than-n^2 multiplication algorithms [...] Actually, when the algorithm is to square a value, the difficulty reduces to ONLY ( n^2 + n ) / 2 which is ...still O(n^2). :-) IN ADDITION, it is the Lucas-Lehmer primality test: I should look it up someday. (The Wikipedia link is of no use to me because Wikipedia is no longer willing to serve content over HTTP as far as I can tell.) that I wish to implement (so I can understand the details along with being able to enjoy the challenge). I can understand that. I've done that with various things myself. So the series of one billion bit multiplications must be repeated (one billion - 2) times. ...ouch! I understand both the Karatsuba and Toom-Cook algorithms sufficiently to EVENTUALLY implement both at this point. I've implemented Karatsuba. I looked into it and decided that, for my purposes, even Toom-3 wasn't worth the bother, so I didn't investigate enough to learn how to implement it - one of the doc files for the program in question says, after explaining Karatsuba, | It is possible to split A and B into more than two pieces and pull | basically the same trick, leading to an even further reduction in the | exponent - this is Toom-Cook multiplication. However, what partial | products are needed and how to combine them get correspondingly more | complicated. While the larger splitting factors do give asymptotically | faster algorithms, the overhead is high enough that the point at which | they become faster in practice rapidly exceeeds the size of numbers | this program is intended for, to the point where it's not worth the | bother of going Toom-Cook (and definitely not worth using | Schönhage-Strassen or Furer). [T]he size of numbers this program is intended for maxes out somewhere around 15K bits, nowhere near what you're working with. If I can perform each squaring operation in just one second, it should take only about 5 years to perform the squaring one billion times. That doesn't sound right. A mean year is 365.2425 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds, which my calculator program says is 31556952. Dividing this into 10, I get 31.6887+, not about 5. Did I miss something? Unfortunately, the Schönhage-Strassen algorithm is still beyond my capability. However, I hope to master it eventually and implement the code. I hope to too. But I currently am nowhere near that; my understanding is that the current state of the art in multiplication is FFT-based things, and I have never truly understood FFTs - I still don't entirely understand even continuous Fourier transforms. If anyone can comment on my question regarding the [DLLs] Also, a link to information about how to implement the Schönhage-Strassen algorithm [...] I can't really help you with either one. Sounds as though you've already gone further than I have in this direction, so I would be more likely to follow you than lead you. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTMLmo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
RE: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
Well, Chuck, thanks a bunch, this is very useful and quite difficult code to write from scratch. How does one compile for DOS by the way (I have to admit I am too young to have ever tried), and get a copy of MSC 8.00C. Is the DOS compiler buried in some part of Visual Studio? I have some old versions dating back from Windows 95 time, when it was called Visual Studio 97... Marc From: Chuck Guzis ccl...@sydex.com Subject: SCSI Tape to TAP utility A couple of weeks ago, I offered to share the source and executable for a SCSI tape-to-SIMH .TAP file utility for MSDOS. To run it, you'll need an ASPI driver for your SCSI adapter. It was compiled using MSC 8.00C. Find it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6qiudlpyitgxom/STP2T02.ZIP?dl=0 Enjoy, Chuck
Re: Classic programming
Yeah, Plan 9 is lean but not that lean! I wanted to mention it maybe more an aside, as a modern operating system that has a little bit more of the fluidity of old UNIX .. there's not a lot of nonsense to cut through before you can write useful programs. Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 5:18 PM, ben bfranc...@jetnet.ab.ca wrote: On 8/9/2015 11:22 AM, Sean Caron wrote: Have you tried Plan 9? It's like a breath of fresh air ... :O Best, Sean But alas almost all the classic machines endup being a IBM 360 or a PDP-10. I don't think plan 9 was written for them. Ben. PS: checks Google to see how much memory PL/I had to compile in ... 44Kb version 1.
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
Grumble ... Google mail ... http://www.ebay.com/itm/Texas-Instruments-Silent-700-Data-Terminal-T367-/181827278594?hash=item2a55c01702 Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Sean Caron sca...@umich.edu wrote: He's got a lot of interesting stuff for sale ... anyone looking for a Silent 700? On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 6:49 PM, Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com wrote: If it was a salvageable set of RX02s, it would have been nice to have! Too bad he pulled the listing. On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Pete Turnbull p...@dunnington.plus.com wrote: On 09/08/2015 18:14, Sean Caron wrote: DEC did sell a version of the BA23 that was intended to be used just as an expansion peripherals cabinet. You shouldn't have any problems putting HH devices in BA23 bays (so long as you have the appropriate interfaces to drive them) but you may need i.e. 3.5 to 5.25 bracket to attach to the BA23 sleds, and you'll have (cosmetic) blank space on top after putting a HH device in a FH bay. I imagine you'd have to make a special bracket to mount a TZ30/RX33 over-under in one of the 5.25 bays in the BA23 but it could certainly be done ... No such factory configuration exists AFAIK If a TZ30 has the same mounting holes as a 5.25 disk drive, it's doable. There's an official DEC mounting kit to mount 2 x RX33 where you'd normally find an RX50 in a BA23/BA123. It's basically two side plates, to hold the upper and lower drives together. -- Pete Pete Turnbull -- Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
Some big Fujitsu SPARC machines, too, if anyone's into those ... some old-ish looking HP boards of unclear provenance (probably came out of test equipment) ... Nice Ungar soldering station in good shape ... very cheap Cisco Sup720s ... a Shugart 801 ... interesting assortment of stuff ... prices are kind of here and there ... I looked at the dual DEC floppy and I'm not seeing how it would fit in a BA23; the BA23 uses a little plastic sled attaching to the bottom of whatever goes in the 5.25 bay; it latches onto a catch at the bottom of the bay; this seems to mount to something with a sort of rail and retaining thumbscrew arrangement? Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Sean Caron sca...@umich.edu wrote: Grumble ... Google mail ... http://www.ebay.com/itm/Texas-Instruments-Silent-700-Data-Terminal-T367-/181827278594?hash=item2a55c01702 Best, Sean On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 6:58 PM, Sean Caron sca...@umich.edu wrote: He's got a lot of interesting stuff for sale ... anyone looking for a Silent 700? On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 6:49 PM, Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com wrote: If it was a salvageable set of RX02s, it would have been nice to have! Too bad he pulled the listing. On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 5:06 PM, Pete Turnbull p...@dunnington.plus.com wrote: On 09/08/2015 18:14, Sean Caron wrote: DEC did sell a version of the BA23 that was intended to be used just as an expansion peripherals cabinet. You shouldn't have any problems putting HH devices in BA23 bays (so long as you have the appropriate interfaces to drive them) but you may need i.e. 3.5 to 5.25 bracket to attach to the BA23 sleds, and you'll have (cosmetic) blank space on top after putting a HH device in a FH bay. I imagine you'd have to make a special bracket to mount a TZ30/RX33 over-under in one of the 5.25 bays in the BA23 but it could certainly be done ... No such factory configuration exists AFAIK If a TZ30 has the same mounting holes as a 5.25 disk drive, it's doable. There's an official DEC mounting kit to mount 2 x RX33 where you'd normally find an RX50 in a BA23/BA123. It's basically two side plates, to hold the upper and lower drives together. -- Pete Pete Turnbull -- Ben Sinclair b...@bensinclair.com
Re: Classic programming
On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 7:57 AM, Paul Koning paulkon...@comcast.net wrote: There’s DECUS ALGOL, which is essentially a PDP-11 version of Burroughs Extended Algol. It generates bytecode which even looks somewhat like B5500 machine code. I still have a copy, though I need to do some work to find the correct sources and build procedure for the runtime support code. Originally written by Barry James Folsom, and later maintained by Gregory David Hosler (of DEC).
Apollo DN series HP root account
I have a vintage apollo question... In the late 1980's when HP acquired Apollo Computer Inc, I recall there was an HP root account, that shipped with every new machine. In many cases this account was not removed. I recently acquired a DN3000 and to my amazement it was clean, and booted to an SR10.4 login prompt. Does anybody remember that HP account and password? Alternative cracks would be welcomed as well. Bill Newman
Re: SCSI Tape to TAP utility
On 08/09/2015 03:03 PM, Jay Jaeger wrote: No, the OS did the drive assignments, and then prompted the operator to do the mount of the appropriate VolSer on a given drive. The label was of course checked as part of the OS/360 open process, and if there was a label, and it was not expired, one could not write over it, or, whether reading or writing, that the label matched the requested DSN. (Remember that OS/360 never heard of the 3480 tapes and their autoloaders - things presumably changed then, along with tape library management software, but by then I had moved on from mainframes, and what little I did with them didn't involve tape). The operators I worked with almost never mismounted a tape. I'd pretty much left the 360 world after DOS/360 (that really dates me), so I couldn't comment--except that I never trusted an operator to mount tapes, if I could do anything about it. A lot of the tapes came from customers who supplied them to demonstrate a problem. Losing one meant a lot of apologies and begging. Much of my big-iron days were spent in operating system work, so I needed the machine all to myself in any case---you know, middle-of-the-night block time, after the CEs were through. Build a tape, deadstart it, watch the machine crash, get a dump, punch some cards, lather, rinse, repeat. Come home to grab a shower and dinner and be back in time for the 9AM status meeting. Those years have affected my sleep habits all the way to my golden years. They didn't do much for my social life either. --Chuck
Re: Classic programming
On 2015-08-08 15:14, Noel Chiappa wrote: From: Kip Koon I have often wondered what the inspiration for the C Language was. BCPL - MCPL - B - c, quite an interesting list of languages. I don't think MCPL is in there; B was directly inspired by BCPL. See Dennis M. Ritchie, The Development of the C Language: http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html I got the impression from the previous discussion that MCPL was a later branch. And one should not forget Algol. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol
Re: Classic programming
From: Johnny Billquist
And one should not forget Algol.
IIRC, Algol is mentioned in the paper I linked to. Of course, Algol's DNA is
in pretty much every procedural language ever created since it was.
From: Andy Holt
(and, for that matter, PL/1 should probably be considered an unsung
inspiration for C as it was the implementation language for Multics
in which Bell labs was a partner and must have inspired at least
the name for Unix)
The paper also mentions PL/I - IIRC, they (Ken, Dennis et al) had used it on
Multics, and didn't like it. (Which I can understand!) I'm not sure there are
any ideas from PL/I (specifically) which influenced C.
Multics' influence on Unix is a very sizeable topic, which I won't derail into
- it's an interest of mine, and I've been doing research on that; my hope is
to do a paper on it at some point. The executive abstract is that the two
extremes one hears ('Unix is derived from Multics'/'Unix is in fact a
counter-reaction to Multics') aren't really accurate - the truth is in the
middle.
Noel
Re: DEC RX02-PA?
The pedestal RX02s are around, but pretty rare. I think they were part of a PDP-8 based word processor (VT78?), and/or part of the smaller PDT11 systems. -- Will On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 12:08 PM, Johnny Billquist b...@update.uu.se wrote: On 2015-08-09 17:48, Ben Sinclair wrote: I found this on eBay, and I'm not sure what it is: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-DIGITAL-RX02-COMPUTER-SYSTEM-2-FLOPPY-DRIVES-UNTESTED-T27-/181827282211?hash=item2a55c02523 I haven't seen RX-02s in a case like this before, and some Googling doesn't seem to reveal much of anything. Does anyone know what this is exactly? That is definitely not an RX02 in the common sense of the word. I would like to see a picture where you can see that Digital sticker in a larger context, so I can see that it really sits on that cabinet. The whole cabinet do not even look in the style of DEC cabinets. Very strange beast. But who knows. DEC might have built some off one-off or something for a special purpose or customer. (Not to mention that RX02 is not a computer to start with...) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip - B. Idol
Guy Steele and Emacs - was Re: Classic programming
On 2015-08-09 11:25 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: From: Eric Christopherson people who like to program in languages or language implementations or libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course, if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc. From: Sean Conner My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get custom system calls to use. ... [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool. Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...) Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there. Peter Siebel's Coders at Work features a chapter/interview with Steele: \\ Siebel: During your time at MIT you were somehow involved in the birth of Emacs. But the early history of Emacs is a hit hazy. What is your version of the story? Steele: My version of the story was that I was playing standards guy. What had happened was there was this display mode that turned TECO into something like a WYSIWYG editor. On our 24x80 screens, 21 lines of what was in the buffer would be shown on the screen and the bottom 3 lines were still a TECO command line. You'd be typing in these TECO commands and only when you hit the double altmode would they then be executed. Then there was the real-time edit mode, where it was suggested that a TECO command throw you in this other mode whereby instead of waiting for you to type the double altmode, TECO would react immediately to single character commands. If you type one character, it would do the command. You type another character, it would do the command. And most printing characters were self-inserting. Then the control characters were used to move forward, back, up, and down. It was a very, very primitive---it looked like a very primitive version of Emacs. Then came the breakthrough. The suggestion was, we have this idea of taking a character and looking it up in a table and executing TECO commands. Why don't we apply that to real-time edit mode? So that every character you can type is used as a lookup character in this table. And the default table says, printing characters are self-inserting and control characters do these things. But let's just make it programmable and see what happens. And what immediately happened was four or five different bright people around MIT had their own ideas about what to do with that. Within just a few months there were five completely incompatible GUI interfaces to TECO. Seibel: So they were just customizing, essentially, the key-bindings? Steele: That's right. And they each had their own ideas about what should be concise because you do it most often and what you can afford to be longer. So one guy, for example, was really concerned about typing in Lisp code and began to experiment with finding balanced parenthesized expressions. And another guy was more interested in text, so he was interested in commands that would move over words and convert between uppercase and lowercase and capitalize them. And that's where those commands in Emacs came from. Different people had different ideas about how the key-bindings ought to be organized. As a systems-support guy for Lisp, I was often called to people's terminals and asked to help them. And I fairly quickly noticed that I couldn't sit down at their TECOs and help them modify their programs because I'd be faced with a set of key-bindings and I had no idea what they were going to do. Seibel: Was one of those guys Richard Stallman? Steele: No, Stallman was the implementer and supporter of TECO. And he provided the built-in real-time edit mode feature, although I think Carl Mikkelsen had worked on the early version of it. He provided the key-bindings feature that made all of this possible. Anyway, there were something like four different macro packages and they were incompatible, and I decided to play standards guy, or community reconciliation guy. I saw something that had been lost in our community, which was the ability to easily help each other at our terminals. I said, OK, we've had some experimentation; we've seen a bunch of ideas. What if we could agree on a common set of key-bindings and draw the best ideas from each of these things? I literally had a pad of paper and ran around the building, talking to these guys, visiting each of
Re: Qbus split ID?
From: Johnny Billquist The 11/34 that I played with did not have a product from Enable. ... The product my 11/34 have came from Systime Thanks for chasing that down. Yes, that would explain the non-meshing memories! :-) In addition, a few wires needs to be changed on the backplane, there is a cable from a CPU card to the Systime card, and a few modifications required on the 11/34 CPU itself. This all makes sense - if one can reach into the CPU, it's definitely plausible to have an upgrade which expands the size of the PARs (unlike the ENABLE board from Able). Noel
