Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Will Senn]

Thanks! UCSD seems to be much more user friendly than SOLO. I look 
forward to messing around with it.


Will

On 2/8/16 11:54 AM, Ron Young wrote:

Your message dated: Fri, 05 Feb 2016 21:48:08 -0600


Ron,

I'm interested and interested in any documentation if there is any as well.

Regards,

Will


The SOLO os stuff is also available on bitsavers

http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp11/Brinch_Hansen_SOLO/

most of the Brinch Hansen's stuff is not online, but googling
might turn up documents.

My UCSD pascal image for pdp 11 can be downloaded from here:

  http://rly2.dyndns.org/UCSD-bootable-rk05.zip

This is a snapshot of the disks that I used to build a bootable
pdp11 version of UCSD II.0. There is a README.TXT file that
has more information. The main image that you want is rk0.dsk
(rtv4_rk.dsk is an RT11 disk that I used to assemble the pdp
boot blocks).

-ron


On 2/5/16 9:35 PM, Ron Young wrote:

On Feb 5, 2016 3:19 PM, Kevin Handy  wrote:

I think there was also a PDP11 version of a Pascal OS (??name forgotten at

*** the moment), and several FORTH systems too.

Two pascal operating systems that come to are UCSD and SOLO (Per Brunch Han

***sen's research os) ... I have bootable rk05 simh images for both if a
***nyone is interested.

-RON
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Clem cole]

There was another system that came out at the same time as Solo and the UCSD 
system: Tunis from Ric Holt then at Toronto.   It's written in concurrent 
Euclid which was one of many Pascal influenced languages of the time. It 
originally ran on the 11 but I believe was later moved to the 68k and I think 
even the 6809.He has a book they describes it.  It's a system call 
equivalent of UNIX V7.  I believe that there was also a C compiler for it but I 
do not think its binary compatible.  

They did it a few years before AST released Minux which was his V7 clone he 
built to teach students. 

Does anyone know it there are sources et al for it?   

Clem

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 8, 2016, at 12:54 PM, Ron Young  wrote:
> 
> Your message dated: Fri, 05 Feb 2016 21:48:08 -0600
> 
>> Ron,
>> 
>> I'm interested and interested in any documentation if there is any as well.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Will
> 
>The SOLO os stuff is also available on bitsavers
> 
>http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp11/Brinch_Hansen_SOLO/
> 
>most of the Brinch Hansen's stuff is not online, but googling
>might turn up documents.
> 
>My UCSD pascal image for pdp 11 can be downloaded from here:
> 
>  http://rly2.dyndns.org/UCSD-bootable-rk05.zip
> 
>This is a snapshot of the disks that I used to build a bootable
>pdp11 version of UCSD II.0. There is a README.TXT file that
>has more information. The main image that you want is rk0.dsk
>(rtv4_rk.dsk is an RT11 disk that I used to assemble the pdp
>boot blocks).
> 
>-ron
>
>>> On 2/5/16 9:35 PM, Ron Young wrote:
 On Feb 5, 2016 3:19 PM, Kevin Handy  wrote:
 I think there was also a PDP11 version of a Pascal OS (??name forgotten at
>   *** the moment), and several FORTH systems too.
>>> Two pascal operating systems that come to are UCSD and SOLO (Per Brunch Han
>   ***sen's research os) ... I have bootable rk05 simh images for both if a
>   ***nyone is interested.
>>> 
>>> -RON
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-02-06 20:32, Dave Wade wrote:




-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Paul
Koning
Sent: 06 February 2016 19:01
To: Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org>
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation



On Feb 5, 2016, at 6:10 PM, Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org> wrote:

Some of the PDFs on bitsavers are searchable.  It would be a good
project to OCR the rest into searchable pdfs - as that also means that
the text can be extracted.   OCR is getting good enough (finally) that
it's feasible.  I'm sure that they'd be accepted back into bitsavers
- searchable is good for everyone.


Some disapprove of OCR for reasons I don't really understand.


It depends how you build the PDF. If you replace the images with the OCR's 
text, which seems to be the default, then you introduce errors.
If you leave the images in place and put text behind the images I can't see 
what the problem is,


For me personally, I would like to have two copies of documentation. One 
which is pure/plain text. No preservation of the scan. Images in the 
documentation needs to be preserved, but nothing else. And then you can 
have the full scanned sources in a different file for those who actually 
want that.


The reason is that working on a 50M pdf file is horrible. PDF do not 
work that good with huge amounts of data for each page. It gets slow, it 
eats resources, and becomes almost unusable as reading material.


I want manuals to use them, not to just "preserve" them.

Johnny

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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-02-06 20:13, Tom Morris wrote:

On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 8:56 AM, Johnny Billquist > wrote:

On 2016-02-06 14:40, Sergii Kolisnyk wrote:


at least RT-11 V5.6 docs on Bitsavers are preserved in
electronic form,
not scanned (PDFs are probably just distilled).


Wow. That is just beautiful. Do you know how those came about?


The release notes says they were prepared with VAX DOCUMENT, which makes
sense given the relatively recent vintage.


Yes. But that is true for a lot of documentation. Scanning them still 
creates bitmaps. These are obviously not scans. So, where did the 
conversion from the sources into PDF happen, and where did the sources 
come from?


Johnny

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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[khandy21yo]

If you want to get serious about OCRing documents, look at how Project 
Gutenberg does ir, 

? After OCR each page goes through 3 passes of cleanup and formatting.

 Original message 
From Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> 
Date: 02/06/2016  2:05 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To Tom Morris <tfmor...@gmail.com> 
Cc simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation 
 

> On Feb 6, 2016, at 2:28 PM, Tom Morris <tfmor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ...
> I think Tesseract is pretty close to the quality of ABBYY.  Google has 
> trained it on a very large corpus and it's used for Google Books, Google 
> Drive OCR, etc, so it gets a fair amount of attention.  Of course, a lot of 
> the training effort has gone into training it for over 100 languages, which 
> isn't really relevant to old computer documentation, but even for plain 
> English, it's received lots of training attention.

Is Tesseract open source?  It sounds vaguely like the one I tried, but I'm not 
sure; I remember something that felt more like a toolkit than like an 
application.

Google's OCR is pretty lousy in many cases.  Perhaps that's because they just 
feed it stuff without ever looking at the result.  There are plenty of Google 
books that have errors in the majority of the words.

paul


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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Ron Young]

On Feb 7, 2016 4:25 AM, khandy21yo  wrote:
>
> If you want to get serious about OCRing documents, look at how Project 
> Gutenberg does ir, 
>
> ? After OCR each page goes through 3 passes of cleanup and formatting.
>

When I was doing my masters, I worked on OCR/IR... It has been a while but some 
things to consider:

Accuracy can be improved by proper training with known ground truth data. If 
the typeface of the RT11 manuals is the 'DEC' standard and matches the other 
scanned files. You can use that for training: produce images from the DOCUMENT 
output along side straight ascii... There's the initial ground truth.

Tesseract  is the OCR engine, there is a project called octopus that provides 
layout and other processing using tesseracts for OCR.

You can improve accuracy by using multiple OCR engines and vote on the results.

Some packages that may help: tesseracts, cuneiform (another OCR engine from 
Russia). Unpaper is a package that can help clean up scan images before ocring.

Having said all of that: for my personal stuff I use gscan2pdf under Ubuntu 
since it includes most of the above packages in a GUI.

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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Timothe Litt]

On 06-Feb-16 16:05, Paul Koning wrote:
>> On Feb 6, 2016, at 2:28 PM, Tom Morris  wrote:
>>
>> ...
>> I think Tesseract is pretty close to the quality of ABBYY.  Google has 
>> trained it on a very large corpus and it's used for Google Books, Google 
>> Drive OCR, etc, so it gets a fair amount of attention.  Of course, a lot of 
>> the training effort has gone into training it for over 100 languages, which 
>> isn't really relevant to old computer documentation, but even for plain 
>> English, it's received lots of training attention.
> Is Tesseract open source?  
Yes, it's open sourced.  https://github.com/tesseract-ocr

> It sounds vaguely like the one I tried, but I'm not sure; I remember 
> something that felt more like a toolkit than like an application.
Yes, it's the engine.  There are various wrappers that provide more
polished interfaces.
> Google's OCR is pretty lousy in many cases.  Perhaps that's because they just 
> feed it stuff without ever looking at the result.  There are plenty of Google 
> books that have errors in the majority of the words.
The amazing thing about a talking dog is not how well it talks, but that
it talks at all.

For the volume of stuff they've scanned, it's pretty impressive.  If a
book is that bad, no one looked at it & retrained.  What Tom sent around
earlier is fairly typical (in my limited experience).  It would take
someone a good hour or two to clean it up.

>   paul
>
>




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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 6, 2016, at 2:28 PM, Tom Morris  wrote:
> 
> ...
> I think Tesseract is pretty close to the quality of ABBYY.  Google has 
> trained it on a very large corpus and it's used for Google Books, Google 
> Drive OCR, etc, so it gets a fair amount of attention.  Of course, a lot of 
> the training effort has gone into training it for over 100 languages, which 
> isn't really relevant to old computer documentation, but even for plain 
> English, it's received lots of training attention.

Is Tesseract open source?  It sounds vaguely like the one I tried, but I'm not 
sure; I remember something that felt more like a toolkit than like an 
application.

Google's OCR is pretty lousy in many cases.  Perhaps that's because they just 
feed it stuff without ever looking at the result.  There are plenty of Google 
books that have errors in the majority of the words.

paul


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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-02-06 14:40, Sergii Kolisnyk wrote:

Hi,

at least RT-11 V5.6 docs on Bitsavers are preserved in electronic form,
not scanned (PDFs are probably just distilled).


Wow. That is just beautiful. Do you know how those came about?

Johnny

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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Tom Morris]

On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 8:56 AM, Johnny Billquist  wrote:

> On 2016-02-06 14:40, Sergii Kolisnyk wrote:
>
>>
>> at least RT-11 V5.6 docs on Bitsavers are preserved in electronic form,
>> not scanned (PDFs are probably just distilled).
>>
>
> Wow. That is just beautiful. Do you know how those came about?


The release notes says they were prepared with VAX DOCUMENT, which makes
sense given the relatively recent vintage.

Tom
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Dave Wade]

> -Original Message-
> From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Paul
> Koning
> Sent: 06 February 2016 19:01
> To: Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org>
> Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
> Subject: Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation
> 
> 
> > On Feb 5, 2016, at 6:10 PM, Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org> wrote:
> >
> > Some of the PDFs on bitsavers are searchable.  It would be a good
> > project to OCR the rest into searchable pdfs - as that also means that
> > the text can be extracted.   OCR is getting good enough (finally) that
> > it's feasible.  I'm sure that they'd be accepted back into bitsavers
> > - searchable is good for everyone.
> 
> Some disapprove of OCR for reasons I don't really understand.

It depends how you build the PDF. If you replace the images with the OCR's 
text, which seems to be the default, then you introduce errors.
If you leave the images in place and put text behind the images I can't see 
what the problem is,


> 
> A problem with OCR is that it's hard to find a good one.  I dabbled with an
> OCR plugin that Adobe once offered (free, and worth about that).  I also
> once tried an open source OCR, which was vastly inferior still.
> 

> But commercial OCR programs exist that do a decent job, especially if the
> scanned material is clean as is the case for much of what is on Bitsavers.  I 
> use
> Abbyy FineReader which I rather like, but I expect there are other good ones
> out there too.
> 

I also use a copy of Abbey Fine Reader PRO I got from a Magazine cover disk. It 
seems to work well, and can be tweaked..

> One key point is that you typically need to spend some time "training" the
> program on the particular type of material -- typeface etc. -- that you're
> working with.  The default settings are rarely adequate.
> 

Fine Reader Pro is OK if the scans are good. My new scanner is quicker and 
produces better scans. It also has a sheet feeder.

>   paul
> 
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Tom Morris]

On Sat, Feb 6, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Paul Koning  wrote:

>
> > On Feb 5, 2016, at 6:10 PM, Timothe Litt  wrote:
> >
> > Some of the PDFs on bitsavers are searchable.  It would be a good
> > project to OCR the rest into searchable pdfs - as that also means that
> > the text can be extracted.   OCR is getting good enough (finally) that
> > it's feasible.  I'm sure that they'd be accepted back into bitsavers  -
> > searchable is good for everyone.
>

To clarify, I'd be focusing on the PDFs which consist of scanned images
only, so not those that already have a searchable text layer, or those
which are "native" text PDFs like RT-11 V5.6 docs.

Some disapprove of OCR for reasons I don't really understand.
>

I'd be interested in hearing the reasons.  I can't see any downside.

A problem with OCR is that it's hard to find a good one.  I dabbled with an
> OCR plugin that Adobe once offered (free, and worth about that).  I also
> once tried an open source OCR, which was vastly inferior still.
>
> But commercial OCR programs exist that do a decent job, especially if the
> scanned material is clean as is the case for much of what is on Bitsavers.
> I use Abbyy FineReader which I rather like, but I expect there are other
> good ones out there too.
>

I think Tesseract is pretty close to the quality of ABBYY.  Google has
trained it on a very large corpus and it's used for Google Books, Google
Drive OCR, etc, so it gets a fair amount of attention.  Of course, a lot of
the training effort has gone into training it for over 100 languages, which
isn't really relevant to old computer documentation, but even for plain
English, it's received lots of training attention.


> One key point is that you typically need to spend some time "training" the
> program on the particular type of material -- typeface etc. -- that you're
> working with.  The default settings are rarely adequate.
>

I don't expect that to be true.  The Google training set includes a large
number of different fonts.  Do you have specific examples of documents that
are difficult to OCR that I could check?

Tom
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Timothe Litt]

On 06-Feb-16 14:01, Paul Koning wrote:
>> On Feb 5, 2016, at 6:10 PM, Timothe Litt  wrote:
>>
>> Some of the PDFs on bitsavers are searchable.  It would be a good
>> project to OCR the rest into searchable pdfs - as that also means that
>> the text can be extracted.   OCR is getting good enough (finally) that
>> it's feasible.  I'm sure that they'd be accepted back into bitsavers  -
>> searchable is good for everyone.
> Some disapprove of OCR for reasons I don't really understand.
In the preservation business, one doesn't want to lose bits.  But it's
possible to keep the scanned image and add searchable/extractable text. 
There's also no reason to throw the scanned version away; foo.pdf +
foo_ocr.pdf = not much expense in these days of multi-TB disk drives.

> A problem with OCR is that it's hard to find a good one.  I dabbled with an 
> OCR plugin that Adobe once offered (free, and worth about that).  I also once 
> tried an open source OCR, which was vastly inferior still.
>
> But commercial OCR programs exist that do a decent job, especially if the 
> scanned material is clean as is the case for much of what is on Bitsavers.  I 
> use Abbyy FineReader which I rather like, but I expect there are other good 
> ones out there too.
I've used the one that came with my ~$150 printer/scanner/fax - and been
very surprised at the (high) quality.

Prior to that, I've been very disappointed.  But I haven't had need to
get seriously into OCR.  I have heard good things about tesseract - once
you get over the hump of setup.  Apparently it has a lot of training
material available.  And (not as relevant here), many languages.  I
think Google took it over from HP and has used it for it's various
massive scanning projects.
> One key point is that you typically need to spend some time "training" the 
> program on the particular type of material -- typeface etc. -- that you're 
> working with.  The default settings are rarely adequate.
Yes, I know.  Although that's gotten less necessary.  One thing we have
going is that companies tend to have a stable/slowly-evolving brand
identity that dictates things like typeface.  So 90+% of all DEC manuals
produced in a 5-10 year period have the same typeface/layout style. 
Then a new era begins.  This tends to be true even of smaller
companies.  So even where training is necessary, it pays back over a
fair volume of material.

But there's no denying that it's a roject.  And that there
are significant fixed costs that it takes a lot of material to amortize...
>   paul
>




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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Paul Koning]

> On Feb 5, 2016, at 6:10 PM, Timothe Litt  wrote:
> 
> Some of the PDFs on bitsavers are searchable.  It would be a good
> project to OCR the rest into searchable pdfs - as that also means that
> the text can be extracted.   OCR is getting good enough (finally) that
> it's feasible.  I'm sure that they'd be accepted back into bitsavers  -
> searchable is good for everyone.

Some disapprove of OCR for reasons I don't really understand.

A problem with OCR is that it's hard to find a good one.  I dabbled with an OCR 
plugin that Adobe once offered (free, and worth about that).  I also once tried 
an open source OCR, which was vastly inferior still.

But commercial OCR programs exist that do a decent job, especially if the 
scanned material is clean as is the case for much of what is on Bitsavers.  I 
use Abbyy FineReader which I rather like, but I expect there are other good 
ones out there too.

One key point is that you typically need to spend some time "training" the 
program on the particular type of material -- typeface etc. -- that you're 
working with.  The default settings are rarely adequate.

paul

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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Sergii Kolisnyk]

Hi,

at least RT-11 V5.6 docs on Bitsavers are preserved in electronic form,
not scanned (PDFs are probably just distilled).

Best regards,
Sergii
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Tom Morris]

I actually started to put together a toolchain to OCR the bitsavers
documentation a few days ago.  I'm not sure why Kevin mentioned MUMPS, but
since MUMPS-11, the precursor to DSM-11 and VAX-11 DSM, was my first
introduction to DEC kit, I was using the PDP-15 MUMPS manual as my test
subject.

I've got a workable, but not optimal tool chain that will produce PDFs with
both page scanned images and embedded OCR'd text.  Due to the nature of
OCR, it'll be more helpful for search-ability than accessibility, but it
will benefit both. The main problem right now is the size of the resulting
PDFs.  The tiny bitonal G4 fax encoded page images get blown up to
ginormous proportions and I haven't found the right magic sequence to get
the pdfimages CCITT encoded files wrapped into a TIFF file (or multiple
files).

Tom

On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 5:50 PM, Zachary Kline  wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> So the recent RSTS/E discussion has got me wondering what OS’s I might be
> able to run under SIMH with readable documentation. As a totally blind
> enthusiast I can’t really use the Bitsavers collection without manually
> running OCR on the PDFs, a tedious and error-prone process.
> I’m aware VMS is recent enough to have a lot of its documentation
> available in an electronic format, but I’m curious if there’s anything else
> out there.
> I’ve recently downloaded several .tap files for RSTS and Tops-20, for
> instance, but have been running into trouble when booting them.
> I guess I’m just curious how a lot of these systems were installed.
>
> Has any work been done on retyping some of the documentation?
> Thanks much,
> Zack.
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Cory Smelosky]

A lot of the TOPS-20 manuals are plain text, or at least TeX, so convertible.

How do you use the simulators?do screen readers handle them well?

I wonder how hard using expect to hook espeak/festival in to simh 's console 
system would be...

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 5, 2016, at 14:50, Zachary Kline  wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> So the recent RSTS/E discussion has got me wondering what OS’s I might be 
> able to run under SIMH with readable documentation. As a totally blind 
> enthusiast I can’t really use the Bitsavers collection without manually 
> running OCR on the PDFs, a tedious and error-prone process.
> I’m aware VMS is recent enough to have a lot of its documentation available 
> in an electronic format, but I’m curious if there’s anything else out there.
> I’ve recently downloaded several .tap files for RSTS and Tops-20, for 
> instance, but have been running into trouble when booting them. 
> I guess I’m just curious how a lot of these systems were installed.
> 
> Has any work been done on retyping some of the documentation?
> Thanks much,
> Zack.
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Cory Smelosky]

Note: I have some TOPS-20 oddities so my documentation is slightly unusual...

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 5, 2016, at 22:57, Cory Smelosky  wrote:
> 
> A lot of the TOPS-20 manuals are plain text, or at least TeX, so convertible.
> 
> How do you use the simulators?do screen readers handle them well?
> 
> I wonder how hard using expect to hook espeak/festival in to simh 's console 
> system would be...
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Feb 5, 2016, at 14:50, Zachary Kline  wrote:
>> 
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> So the recent RSTS/E discussion has got me wondering what OS’s I might be 
>> able to run under SIMH with readable documentation. As a totally blind 
>> enthusiast I can’t really use the Bitsavers collection without manually 
>> running OCR on the PDFs, a tedious and error-prone process.
>> I’m aware VMS is recent enough to have a lot of its documentation available 
>> in an electronic format, but I’m curious if there’s anything else out there.
>> I’ve recently downloaded several .tap files for RSTS and Tops-20, for 
>> instance, but have been running into trouble when booting them. 
>> I guess I’m just curious how a lot of these systems were installed.
>> 
>> Has any work been done on retyping some of the documentation?
>> Thanks much,
>> Zack.
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Timothe Litt]

Some of the PDFs on bitsavers are searchable.  It would be a good
project to OCR the rest into searchable pdfs - as that also means that
the text can be extracted.   OCR is getting good enough (finally) that
it's feasible.  I'm sure that they'd be accepted back into bitsavers  -
searchable is good for everyone.

For the Bookreader stuff - I wrote code to navigate it with my Braille
workstations, but it won't  work on other hardware.
Much of the later releases of VMS also shipped a PC format CD that can
be read with a screen reader.  In the next few months, I'll be
contributing a large collection of those to CHM.

Before I wrote that, I was able to get some of the docs in text format
from the tech writers; sadly that option no longer exists.

Most of the TOPS documentation was originally done in Runoff, later DEC
Standard Runoff.  Sources are, I think, on the later tapes.  That's 
easy to turn into readable text files.  Unfortunately, by the end I
think they were converted to VAX Document & shipped as postscript. 
There's always ps2text, but the quality is variable to bad.

On 05-Feb-16 17:50, Zachary Kline wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> So the recent RSTS/E discussion has got me wondering what OS’s I might be 
> able to run under SIMH with readable documentation. As a totally blind 
> enthusiast I can’t really use the Bitsavers collection without manually 
> running OCR on the PDFs, a tedious and error-prone process.
> I’m aware VMS is recent enough to have a lot of its documentation available 
> in an electronic format, but I’m curious if there’s anything else out there.
> I’ve recently downloaded several .tap files for RSTS and Tops-20, for 
> instance, but have been running into trouble when booting them. 
> I guess I’m just curious how a lot of these systems were installed.
>
> Has any work been done on retyping some of the documentation?
> Thanks much,
> Zack.
> ___
> Simh mailing list
> Simh@trailing-edge.com
> http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh




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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Kevin Handy]

I believe that VMS is probable the only one of DEC's Operating Systems that
is likely to have machine readable documentation (Both PDF and HTML iirc.).

All of the other OSs were mostly out of production by the time that HTML
and PDF's became popular, and I don't believe that DEC ever gave away their
documentation in source form.

Non-DEC OS's, such as Unix, are more likely to have such documentation
available. But Unix is also available for the VAX, which doesn't have the
same memory limits as the PDP11 does and was under development more
recently, so that might be more interesting to work on (NetBSD for example).

I'm not sure how MUMPS documentation was, or if that OS is even available
to hobbyest usage.

I think there was also a PDP11 version of a Pascal OS (??name forgotten at
the moment), and several FORTH systems too.
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[Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Zachary Kline]

Hi All,

So the recent RSTS/E discussion has got me wondering what OS’s I might be able 
to run under SIMH with readable documentation. As a totally blind enthusiast I 
can’t really use the Bitsavers collection without manually running OCR on the 
PDFs, a tedious and error-prone process.
I’m aware VMS is recent enough to have a lot of its documentation available in 
an electronic format, but I’m curious if there’s anything else out there.
I’ve recently downloaded several .tap files for RSTS and Tops-20, for instance, 
but have been running into trouble when booting them. 
I guess I’m just curious how a lot of these systems were installed.

Has any work been done on retyping some of the documentation?
Thanks much,
Zack.
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Johnny Billquist]

Hi. Afraid I am unaware of any attempts to OCR or retype the documentation.

It's a pet peeve of mine, but most other people around here seem to 
prefer bitmaps of scans of the documentation. So I don't really expect 
anything to happen there.


How were the systems installed? For PDP-11 systems, you normally had a 
tape system, or some smaller removable disk. You started the 
installation system on that device, and then that thing helped you to 
install the full system on your system disk.


Unix is a little more complicated.

Johnny

On 2016-02-05 23:50, Zachary Kline wrote:

Hi All,

So the recent RSTS/E discussion has got me wondering what OS’s I might be able 
to run under SIMH with readable documentation. As a totally blind enthusiast I 
can’t really use the Bitsavers collection without manually running OCR on the 
PDFs, a tedious and error-prone process.
I’m aware VMS is recent enough to have a lot of its documentation available in 
an electronic format, but I’m curious if there’s anything else out there.
I’ve recently downloaded several .tap files for RSTS and Tops-20, for instance, 
but have been running into trouble when booting them.
I guess I’m just curious how a lot of these systems were installed.

Has any work been done on retyping some of the documentation?
Thanks much,
Zack.
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--
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
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[Ron Young]

On Feb 5, 2016 3:19 PM, Kevin Handy  wrote:
>
> I think there was also a PDP11 version of a Pascal OS (??name forgotten at 
> the moment), and several FORTH systems too.
>

Two pascal operating systems that come to are UCSD and SOLO (Per Brunch 
Hansen's research os) ... I have bootable rk05 simh images for both if anyone 
is interested.

-RON
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