For sale: FANUC Tape Reader and Adapter
I put my FANUC tape reader for sale on Ebay, if anyone might be interested:
Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
On 8/2/21 8:11 AM, James Liu via cctech wrote: > Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. Happy to contirubte. > For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's > at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less > insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high > level languages would just get in the way and slow things down. The > code was maintained by Veltman and Strubbe well into the 1970's, but > its future was held back by being so closely tied to CDC hardware. Which CDC FORTRAN? RUN, maybe--but FTN extended was pretty darned good in optimizing and scheduling instructions. A lot of work went into that one. As a matter of fact, when we COMPASS scriveners came up against a nasty loop that we wanted to optimize for the 6600, one approach was to code it in FORTRAN to see what the compiler would do with it and then work from there. Some of the optimizations were quite startling, particularly with the "UO" option selected. If you've never written and hand-optimized 6600 code, it could be a daunting task. Did you know that parts of FTN are written in FTN? I recall the COMMON/EQUIVALENCE processor written as a mess of assigned GOTO statements (state machine) and being utterly bereft of commentary."Don't touch it--you might break something!" FORTRAN was CDC's bread-and-butter language for years, as it was the universal choice of number-crunchers everywhere during the 60s through 80s. And CDC excelled at number-crunching. My .02 for what it's worth. --Chuck
Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
> On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech > wrote: > > Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from > one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made > around 1978 at SLAC. > > For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's > at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less > insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high > level languages would just get in the way and slow things down. Depending on what he was trying to do that may well be a valid assessment. CDC Fortran was known to be pretty good, but Fortran is not the obvious answer for implementing interpreters or other language processors, which this sounds like. > ... > Getting back to the tape, I'm pretty sure it has Strubbe's PL/I like > code as it is an archive of the PL/I conversion. It may also have CDC > source, but that is less obvious until we can see the contents. The > CDC source is historically the most relevant, and I am hoping it > exists on the tape. Just to make sure you're aware of this: if it is CDC source code, you can run that on the DtCyber emulator. That's a full 6000 / 170 series machine emulator which can run almost all CDC 6000 series software and operating systems. Not a 180 (for NOS/VE) system, nor an implementation of the 7600 architecture, but I assume you're not dealing with peripheral processor code anyway. DtCyber is open source; a fork of it has been running the PLATO system for over 10 years now. Copies of NOS are also openly available (by permission of the owners, not bootleg copies). paul
Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made around 1978 at SLAC. For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high level languages would just get in the way and slow things down. The code was maintained by Veltman and Strubbe well into the 1970's, but its future was held back by being so closely tied to CDC hardware. In the mid 1970's, Strubbe began a conversion of Schoonschip to IBM S/360 and S/370. It was sort of a curious technique, as far as I gathered. The idea was to first translate CDC COMPASS source to an intermediate PL/I like language. But then, instead of using the IBM PL/I compiler, a bunch of macros were developed to implement the PL/I like language in IBM assembly. This conversion was never fully completed for reasons unknown to me. Later on, when Tini joined the University of Michigan (that's where I'm located), he realized that Schoonschip needed to be updated. But the update was ... instead of CDC assembly he decided on m68k assembly. (At this time, in the early 1980's, C probably would have been the natural language of choice.) Moreover, he insisted on developing his own toolchain (assembler, linker, etc). This was before my time at Michigan, but basically he ported Schoonschip to just about all the m68k machines of that era (Sun, Atari, Amiga, Mac, NeXT, and others I am not familiar with). We have a pretty good collection of m68k code (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~williams/Vsys/index.html), but nothing earlier. Getting back to the tape, I'm pretty sure it has Strubbe's PL/I like code as it is an archive of the PL/I conversion. It may also have CDC source, but that is less obvious until we can see the contents. The CDC source is historically the most relevant, and I am hoping it exists on the tape. - jim -- James T. Liu, Professor of Physics 3409 Randall Laboratory, 450 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1040 Tel: 734 763-4314Fax: 734 763-2213Email: jim...@umich.edu
