[cctalk] The Atomic Energy Commission [was Re: Re: Odd IBM mass storage systems]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2024 15:28:34 -0300
> From: Paul Berger via cctalk 

> The 1360 was apparently developed at the request to Atomic Energy Commission
> (AEC), I  would guess a forerunner of the DOE.   There where apparently only
> 5 built 3 for the AEC and 2 for the NSA.

The United States Atomic Energy Commission was superseded by the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission in the 1970s.  The Department of Energy is not the same
thing at all.

Rich

[cctalk] HAPPY DEC-20 DAY!

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

   Happy DEC-20 Day!

My late friend Mark always noted that TOPS-20 (and the DECSYSTEM-20 on which it
runs) was a great improvement on its successors.

I wish you all a joyous Winter Solstice Festival, however you may choose to
celebrate it.

Rich

[cctalk] Re: mainframe vs mini

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

Jumping in late because the list blew up so badly on this topic.  Yes, others
have already commented on these things, but I'll add my US$0.02 worth anyway.

> Date: Thu, 9 Mar 2023 16:00:05 -0600
> From: Steve Lewis via cctalk 

> Actually, to answer my own question:  if "main frame" refers to the actual
> framing... well the PDP-1, PDP-10, PDP-10 were minicomputers and still
> required a lot of metal "framing" to set up.  So, can't they be considered
> mainframes?

Don't be fooled by the naming convention of a single computer manufacturer who
was getting around GAO rules about computers.  Before the coining of the term
"minicomputer", most systems from Digital Equipment Corporation were classified
as "small computers".  This nomenclature covers the PDP-1, the PDP-4/7/9/15,
and the PDP-5/8 (-8, -8i/l, -8e/f/m, -8A).

However, the PDP-6 was marketed into the same customer space as IBM and the
Seven Dwarfs (Burroughs, Univac, CDC, NCR, Honeywell, RCA, and GE), which
became the BUNCH after RCA and GE sold their computer divisions to other
members of the group.  The PDP-6 were advertised as a multiuser system which
featured built-in timesharing (an extra cost add-on feature of some of the
others at the time) as well as batch processing.  It supported large disks and
drums, high speed printers and card reader/punches, and strings of magnetic
tape drives.  It required a staff of professional operators and systems
programmers to run.

By all measures, the PDP-6 was a 1964 mainframe computer.

The PDP-10 was a reimplementation of the PDP-6 using a safer technology (the -6
turned out to be fragile, and nearly bankrupted the company).  The engineering
for the -10 was done as a skunkworks project, and the mainframe nature of the
system was hidden from Ken Olsen, the CEO/founder, but customers were not
fooled and recognized it as a mainframe.

> (another notion is that mainframes are "multi-user" -- most early
> microcomputers were not multi-user, as they just barely supported the needs
> of one user;  I'm not sure if the very first minicomputers were multi-user?)

Early mainframes were single user, in the sense that only one program could be
run at a time.  Spooling of jobs was invented to alleviate the time "wasted" in
having operators set up and reconfigure jobs, but it was still a one-at-a-time
thing.  Timesharing was an extra cost add-on based on research systems at
places like MIT.

The very first minicomputers were indeed single-user--but see below.

> The term minicomputer has always been awkward to me -- "mini" in my head
> just means something smaller than me, which most minicomputers aren't (but
> they are much smaller than a building).   But to say "mainframe" when
> showing a minicomputer then necessitates some explanation...  Can't win :(

The term "minicomputer" was marketing speak:  The first computer to receive the
appellation was the PDP-8/e, which was the third generation of the PDP-8 family
(where the PDP-5 is "generation zero").  The first generation PDP-8 fit into
the back of a VW convertible (a famous marketing photo); the third would fit on
the passenger side front seat.  It came out at a time when the miniskirt was in
full bloom, and everything in the marketing world was "Mini! Mini! Mini!"--even
when it wasn't.

BTW, the PDP-8/i (second generation) *did* have an extra cost option to be a
multiuser timesharing system, with an operating system called TSS-8.  It was
created by the engineers who built the PDP-10, because they wanted small system
users to have access to the cool features of that mainframe.  (I was told this
by one of the designers of the PDP-10, Bob Clements, who also worked on TSS-8).

Rich

[cctalk] Re: mainframe vs mini

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

Still catching up.

> Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2023 06:39:16 +
> From: Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk 

> I believe the term minicomputer was first applied to the PDP-8.  It was kind
> of retroactively applied going back to the PDP-1.  Whether the PDP-10 is a
> mini is sometimes hotly debated.  IBM people say no, DEC peole say yes.

Lars, you have that backwards.  DEC people *know* that the PDP-10 et seq. were
mainframes (with the single exception of the DECSYSTEM-2020 office computer),
while IBMers don't think anything not built by the Mother Ship is a mainframe
(if it was build after the System/360 announcement, which came 3 weeks after
the DEC announcement of the PDP-6, also a mainframe).

Rich

[cctalk] Re: AI applied to vintage interests

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2023 11:46:33 -0800
> From: Jay Logue via cctalk 

> //On 1/16/2023 6:05 PM, Chris via cctalk wrote:

>> They write songs, create works of art. They can do a lot of stuff. The
>> question in my mind is can these AI appliances make guesses and are they any
>> good at it.

>> Anyway how hard would it be for an AI to rewrite a standard MS-DOS to suit a
>> particular machine? Have they reached the level of sophistication whereby
>> they can analyze code and rewrite sections?

> I don't know about guessing, but ChatGPT can deadpan bullshit with the 
> best of them...

> Prompt: /Describe the purpose of the DC LO signal in the DIGITAL PDP-11 
> Unibus/

  [ snip ]

> /It's worth noting that the PDP-11 was a 36-bit word machine and the DC 
> LO and DC HI signals were used to transfer 18-bits of data at a time. It 
> has also a feature of memory mapping, where it can access memory through 
> a virtual address space, allowing more than one peripheral device to be 
> connected to the same address on the Unibus./

I'm assuming that the leading slashes are a QUOTE indicator.

If ChatGPT has concluded that the PDP-11 was a 36 bit system, then it's even
stupider than the mainstream press has made it sound.

Rich

[cctalk] Re: LC:M+L (Living Computer Museum)

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Sun, 30 Oct 2022 21:50:42 -0700
> From: Sellam Abraham via cctalk 

> I'm hoping Rich Alderson will pipe in and give us the actual story as to
> what's going on with the LCM and its collection, but there's a possibility
> that he may be legally constricted from giving comment at this time.

> Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2022 15:31:43 +0800
> From: Tom Hunter via cctalk 

> The Internet is wonderful for misinformation and a good laugh.
> Here even Paul Allen's sister Jody can morph into Paul's wife.:-)

Yeah, I was going to correct that ;-)

> Rich Alderson please provide the LCM facts if you can to stop the silly
> rumours.

First, let me thank Sellam and Tom for inviting me to comment on this topic.

LCM+L closed its doors to the public in March 2020, at the height of the
initial pandemic (in the sense that it had become clear that the Covid-19 virus
was not a passing thing), because our entire mission was to make possible
actual physical contact between visitors to the museum and vintage computing
engines of various stripe.  There was no way to allow visitors to continue to
touch all the hardware which would protect both visitors and the equipment.

Tour guides and front desk personnel were immediately let go, because it was
clear that it would be several months, up to a year, before we could open
again.  Professional museum staff (curator, educational coordinator, etc.) were
retained for a short while, to wind things down.  The engineers were put to
work winding things down:  Creating power-down-bring-up documentation, backing
up software on those systems for which that was necessary, and generally making
it possible to close up shop with an eye to opening again in a year (the target
period).

This project was the response to the original order simply to turn everything
off.  We pointed out vociferously how much damage that would do to the
dinosaurs, reminding the nontechnical powers-that-be of just how long it had
taken to make most of the vintage hardware work again, and that they could plan
on a month of restoration per month of down time, before the museum could be
reopened after the decision was made to do so.

All of the engineers, which the exception of the manager of the department,
were laid off as of 1 July 2020.  None of us was allowed to return to the
museum at any future time, and no one associated with the mothballed museum was
allowed to talk to any of us.

All of that is by way of saying that I have no information on the internal
state of the collection, or of the museum which we built on it.

As for the status of the collection:  While we built the museum, there was a
private foundation set up which acquired items for the collection, generally by
purchase.  After 5 years of successful operations, with year over year
increases in visitor counts, ongoing relationships with several school
districts for instructional field trips, and worldwide acclaim, the decision
was to taken to move to a 501(c)(3) public charity.  This transition was under
way when Paul died suddenly; that placed things into limbo because the
transition was incomplete, and the estate could not do things that he could
have done in person.

That's as much as I know.

    Rich Alderson

[cctalk] Re: LC:M+L (Living Computer Museum)

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

First, let me thank Sellam and Tom for inviting me to comment on this topic.

LCM+L closed its doors to the public in March 2020, at the height of the
initial pandemic (in the sense that it had become clear that the Covid-19 virus
was not a passing thing), because our entire mission was to make possible
actual physical contact between visitors to the museum and vintage computing
engines of various stripe.  There was no way to allow visitors to continue to
touch all the hardware which would protect both visitors and the equipment.

Tour guides and front desk personnel were immediately let go, because it was
clear that it would be several months, up to a year, before we could open
again.  Professional museum staff (curator, educational coordinator, etc.) were
retained for a short while, to wind things down.  The engineers were put to
work winding things down:  Creating power-down-bring-up documentation, backing
up software on those systems for which that was necessary, and generally making
it possible to close up shop with an eye to opening again in a year (the target
period).

This project was the response to the original order simply to turn everything
off.  We pointed out vociferously how much damage that would do to the
dinosaurs, reminding the nontechnical powers-that-be of just how long it had
taken to make most of the vintage hardware work again, and that they could plan
on a month of restoration per month of down time, before the museum could be
reopened after the decision was made to do so.

All of the engineers, which the exception of the manager of the department,
were laid off as of 1 July 2020.  None of us was allowed to return to the
museum at any future time, and no one associated with the mothballed museum was
allowed to talk to any of us.

All of that is by way of saying that I have no information on the internal
state of the collection, or of the museum which we built on it.

As for the status of the collection:  While we built the museum, there was a
private foundation set up which acquired items for the collection, generally by
purchase.  After 5 years of successful operations, with year over year
increases in visitor counts, ongoing relationships with several school
districts for instructional field trips, and worldwide acclaim, the decision
was to taken to move to a 501(c)(3) public charity.  This transition was under
way when Paul died suddenly; that placed things into limbo because the
transition was incomplete, and the estate could not do things that he could
have done in person.

That's as much as I know.

Rich Alderson

P. S.  After the layoff, I looked for work for a few months, with nary a
   nibble.  I've officially been retired for tax purposes since September 
2021.

[cctalk] Re: datapoint 2200 programming

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2022 23:08:23 -0500
> From: Steve Lewis via cctalk 

> I recall the story by Paul Allen - they had developed a BASIC, but didn't
> have a boot loader to load it, and Paul wrote one while on the airplane to
> MOS.

MITS, not MOS.

Messrs. Allen, Gates, and Davidoff wrote their BASIC for the Altair 8800 using
a chip emulator created by Allen using the Unimplemented User Operation (UUO)
facility of the PDP-10.  He originally emulated the 8008, but updated it when
the 8080 came out.

He recreated the boot code for us to use on our restored 8800 at LCM+L, so that
he could demonstrate the Altair BASIC for Leslie Stahl when she interviewed him
for "60 Minutes" (when his memoir "Idea Man" was first published).  He spent
several weeks at the nascent museum debugging the BASIC interpreter prior to
her visit--we did not have the final code he demo'd at MITS, but backups of the
development sources, so he had to fix some known bugs.

Rich

[cctalk] Re: Bendix G-15 Restoration

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2022 19:25:38 +
> From: Mike Begley via cctalk 

> The folks at the Living Computer Museum + Labs in Seattle were working on a
> restoration of one of these, or another, similar Bendix machine.  They remain
> closed (who knows if they will ever reopen), but there might be a way to find
> some of the people who were doing the work.

Hi, Mike,

I forwarded the original post to Keith Perez, the engineer who did the
restoration at LCM+L, when it arrived in my mailbox.  I haven't heard from him
to know if he contacted the poster.

Keith had the machine working very nicely.  In addition to the actual
restoration, he created a device which fit into the tube (Brit. valve) holders
to report the health of the tubes (which are not visible when the computer is
assembled) and report via edge-visible LEDs; these were easily 3D-printed and
cost effective.

We actually had two G-15s; Keith worked on getting the second into running
condition as well.

Rich

[cctalk] Re: Minicomputer front panel.

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2022 18:09:47 +0100
> From: Joshua Rice via cctalk 

> The Cray was often coupled witha DG nova for bootstrapping, which very much
> did have a front panel on it. Indeed, many models of PDP-10 were bootstrapped
> by PDP-11's with front panels, even if the PDP-10 lacked one. The CDC Cyber
> however, had "dead start" panels hidden behind shouding, which could be used
> in a very similar way to a front panel.

Sorry, only 1 model of PDP-10 was bootstrapped by a PDP-11 (specifically an
11/40 running either KLDCP or RSX-20F).  That was the KL-10, featured in the
DECsystem-1080, DECsystem-1088, DECsystem-1090, DECsystem-1099, DECsystem-1095,
DECSYSTEM-2040, DECSYSTEM-2050, DECSYSTEM-2060, and DECSYSTEM-2065.

The 1088 and 1099 were multiple-processor configurations of the 1080 and 1090
or 1095, respectively.

The 1095/2065 was the same hardware, with the expanded cache and MG-20 memory,
with paint color depending on the OS.

The KS-10 processor in the DECSYSTEM-2020 (which never had a Dec-10 designation)
had an 8080 as the front end processor.

The earlier models[1], using the KA-10 or KI-10 processors, had the equivalent
of the CDC deadstart switch or IBM IPL button, and a way to enter the address
of the I/O device from which to boot on the control panel beneath the large
array of blinking lights.

Rich

[1] For completeness: the KA-10 is used in the PDP-10/30, PDP-10/40, and
PDP-10/50 (which oculd be doubled in the PDP-10/55), while the KI-10
is used in the DECsystem-1070 and -1077.

[cctalk] Re: Connecting a physical terminal via LAN to Serial Port

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2022 14:57:07 -0700
> From: Ali via cctalk 

> I agree that is exactly the behavior I want. However, none of the devices
> that have been suggested seem to do that i.e. connecting a Lantronix UDS1100
> to the dumb terminal does not provide a usable telnet CLIENT interface. The
> device has been designed to act as a telnet SERVER to expose the host
> (i.e. RAID Controller interface) to the outside via the telnet
> protocol. Again for most uses this is all you need. You would then use
> whatever modern device you have with a telnet client to connect to your
> device. I am throwing a monkey wrench in it by trying to use a 1980s dumb
> terminal as my I/O device. :)

> As we discussed any half decent system (a 486, SPARC, etc.) can provide the
> intelligence to do this. I was hoping there was a purpose built box that
> could be used in a turnkey manner and be hidden away out of sight for my
> use. Failing that rolling a Pi system w/ serial HAT or a USB to RS232 adapter
> maybe the cheapest option as you suggested.

What you have been describing, and what no one else seems to have twigged to,
is what we called a TIP ("terminal interface processor") or EtherTIP (because
it sat directly on the 3Mbit/10Mbit Ethernet, unlike the ARPANET TIPs that sat
on a 56Kbit leased line).  There were dozens of these scattered across the
Stanford campus when I arrived there at the start of the autumn quarter.

These were Cisco boxes (although they predated 'cisco Systems by a few years)
configured with one or more RS-232 interface cards which IIRC supported 16
lines per card, and sat on the same Multibus backplane as the SUN-1 processor
board which ran the Cisco software (later called "IOS") and the Ethernet
interface card (which attached to the thicknet cables with a vampire tap).
Later versions, of course, used thinnet (i.e. 10base2), and even later used
10baseT.  The box was the same as the Cisco routers with the addition of
serial cards.

The user sitting at the dumb terminal typed a carriage return, the TIP woke up,
and the user saw a prompt for a hostname on the command line.  (Other commands
were available, but the default was to treat any unrecognized command as a
hostname.)  The TIP would then open a telnet connection to the specified host,
and the user would do whatever she wanted to on the remote box.

Cisco still (I think) sells TIP-style boxes, although they are generally based
on Catalyst designs, since Cisco's engineers were more concerned with making
better routers after a while.  You should be able to find a relatively
inexpensive Catalyst type box on ePay.  Put it on your LAN, hook your dumb
terminal to it, and Robert's your male parental sibling.

Rich

Re: 3phase power for VAXen [was Re: VAX 780 on eBay]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2022 14:44:00 -0800
> From: Van Snyder via cctalk 

> On Tue, 2022-01-04 at 17:17 -0500, Rich Alderson via cctalk wrote:
>> Paul Allen wanted me to acquire a VAX-11/780 for his
>> collection

> John Zabolitzky has an operating VAX -- I don't know the vintage --
> eleven cabinets, in his collection in Neubiberg, a southeastern suburb
> of Munich.

> He also has a Cyber 180, Cyber 960, Cray Y-ML EL, Cray T3E, NEC SX-6,
> IBM 705, 

> Photos
> at 
> https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPGeVphL95gtsGIO96iU4APdtSRnHhcm1y4-YaPspa6_jDuAZw6cfD3FR3OFr8czw?key=MjJZNUVjMWtLRkVKbmF2TnFDa3ZneDM0WWFqZ0hB

Yes, I know about John's collection.  Thanks.

I suppose I should have pointed out that the story posted took place about 15
years ago, when we were all younger and healthier and living...

Rich

3phase power for VAXen [was Re: VAX 780 on eBay]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2022 13:19:51 -0800
> From: Guy Sotomayor via cctalk 

> On 1/1/22 10:40 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:

>>> On Jan 1, 2022, at 1:12 PM, Noel Chiappa via cctalk  
>>> wrote:

>>> This:

>>> https://www.ebay.com/itm/275084268137

>>> The starting price is expensive, but probably not utterly unreasonable,
>>> given that:

>>> - the 780 was the first VAX, and thus historically important

>>> - 780's are incredibly rare; this is the first one I recall seeing for sale
>>>   in the classic computer era (versus several -11/70's, /40s, etc)

>>> - this one appears to be reasonably complete; no idea if all the key CPU
>>>   boards are included, but it's things like the backplane, etc (all of which
>>>   seem to be there) which would be completely impossible to find now - if 
>>> any
>>>   boards _are_ missing, there's at least the _hope_ that they can be located
>>>   (780 boards seem to come by every so often on eBait), since people seem to
>>>   keep boards, not realizing that without the other bits they are useless

>> Interesting, but the argument for why it's not tested is implausible which
>> makes me very suspicious.  I suppose there might be a few American homes
>> that have only 110 volt power, but I'm hard pressed to think of any I have
>> ever seen, and that includes really old houses.

> Without replacing the power controller in the 11/780, you need 208v 3-phase
> to run it.  It's not impossible...nothing in the CPU actually *needs* 3-phase
> as the individual power supplies are 120v but the overall maximum load is
> greater than a 30A 120v circuit.

> TTFN - Guy

I've been reading this thread for the last few days, without the time to reply.
All the statutes of limitations have run out, so I can tell the story; it will
be clear shortly why I'm piggybacking on Guy's post.

Back in the mists of time, Paul Allen wanted me to acquire a VAX-11/780 for his
collection.  Shortly after that request landed in my inbox, the DECUS DFWLUG
announced that they would not be opening their VAX museum due to the untimely
passing of the gentleman who was driving the effort, and that they would be
disposing of the collection.  I contacted the person who was handling the
deaccession, but he would not discuss it with me because someone else had
already arranged to take the whole collection.

That person was Guy Sotomayor.

Guy sold Paul two 11/785 systems (one an upgrade, with the 780-5 replacement
label!) in chassis, with a third full set of boards as spares.  I flew down to
the Bay Area and had lunch with Guy, saw his DEC-10 and all that, and arranged
for the shipping.

Shortly after that, Paul floated the idea of turning the collection into an
actual museum.  (At the time, the project consisted of me and an electrical
engineer named Keith Perez, who devoted his spare time to helping me keep
Paul's big iron running.  Keith was building the digital control system for
Paul's submarine at the time.)  The project, an online "museum" called
PDPplanet, changed its name to Living Computer Museum; we hired a third
engineer to help, Ian King, who was eminently qualified to get the VAXen up and
running based on his own private collection of VAXen and -11s in his basement.

We did not have a 3phase outlet on the second floor of the building where the
collection was housed, and there was no room for the first VAX in the small
computer room on the third floor, so Ian and Keith came up with an alternative:
They tested all the outlets on the second floor and determined that there were
three within reach of the room in which Ian was going to work on the 785 which
were fed from 3 different phases off the big honking breaker panel (200A
service, IIRC).  Keith put together a box with the appropriate NEMA socket and
three heavy duty cords feeding into it, which in turn were plugged into three
outlets on the walls around what eventually became the vintage exhibition hall
at Living Computers: Museum + Labs (the eventual name of the place after the
modern exhibit space on the first floor was built).

So it's possible to power a 780 or 785 without a power supply rebuild if you
simply have the right (industrial) breaker panel in your building...

Happy New Year, everybody!

Rich

Happy DEC-20 Day!

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

...and a joyful Winter Solstice Festivalof your choosing to you all!

Rich

Re: Toad1 XKL version of TOPS20 v7

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2021 15:26:43 -0400
> From: Bob Smith via cctalk 

> I have noted that the Computer History Museum has a number of donations from
> XKL re Toad1.

Look again.  That system, the documentation, and the backup tapes, were donated
by HEWLETT-PACKARD CORPORATION, not by XKL.  Tim Litt was responsible for this
donation, probably to keep ev erything from simply being binned by the HP folks.

> Rich Alderson might be the resident expert for this set of questions.

Quite likely. ;->

> two questions are thus prompted, and a third teased.
> 1. Does that XKL version run on the KLH10 emulator?

Absolutely not.

KLH10 emulates a KL-10 processor with Massbus peripherals, which is what Ken
Harrenstien was interested in doing.  Neither he, nor the late Mark Crispin
after he took over maintenance on KLH10, had access to Toad-1 internals.

Major differences between the two processors:

1.  The XKL-1 CPU (and all follow-on processors) implement the full 30-bit
extended addressing defined for release 4 of TOPS-20 by DEC.  The KL-10
implements a 23-bit subset.
2.  In conjunction with this, the XMG-1 memory card provides 32MW of
memory, contrasted with the physical maximum of 4MW in the KL-10.
3.  The XRH-1 I/O processor implements 4 FASTWIDE SCSI-2 channels (top of
the line in 1995 when the system was introduced), rather than Massbus.
4.  The XNI-1 Ethernet board implements 4 10baseT interfaces compatible
with the Stanford MEIS rather than the DEC NIA-20.
5.  The backplane of the Toad-1 system implements a completely different
model of inter-card interactions than the KL-10, so that so-called "I/O
instructions" are completely different from those of the KL-10.  They
resemble, but are unrelated in detail to, the I/O instructions on the
KS-10 processor in the DECSYSTEM-2020.

With all these differences, there is no way for KLH10 to even begin to execute
the XKL version of the TOPS-20 monitor.

> 2. Is the tape CHM has been archived anywhere it might be available
> for download?

That's a question for Al Kossow, rather than for me, since I was never
associated with CHM other than as an admirer.

> and the teaser
> 3. Has anyone created an SSH Server for TOPS20?

Not to my knowledge, although it has been attempted several times.

Although it has not been fully set up yet, AFAIK, the folks at SDF.org have
just acquired an XKL DarkStar box in the TOPS-20 engine configuration, and will
be moving from a KLH-10 emulation to actual PDP-10 hardware in the very near
future.  This is a TOAD-2, like those run by LCM+L for the last few years of
its operation.

Rich

Re: IBM 1620; was: Early Programming Books

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2021 16:02:20 -0400
> From: Paul Koning via cctalk 

>> On Jun 21, 2021, at 3:52 PM, Chuck Guzis  wrote:

>> On 6/21/21 11:53 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

>>> Perhaps you were thinking about the CDC 6500 at the late lamented LCM?
>>> That got some replacement stacks, which was an interesting puzzle because
>>> the read data connection out of the memory modules is a differential analog
>>> signal carrying the sense wire data, so the replacement module had to
>>> produce signals of that form.

>> From whence did the LCM 6500 come?

> Some vague memory says Purdue.  LCM actually got it running, which was an
> interesting problem.  It required recreating the inter-chassis cables (since
> the original ones were cut as part of dismantling the machine) and restoring
> the cooling system.  That was a bit tricky since it uses non-PC coolant,
> which actually still exists but can't be manufactured any longer -- you have
> to use whatever recycled material still exists in the world, and find a
> graybeard AC tech who knows how to work with the stuff.

> I think the machine is pretty much original except that a few core stacks
> were busted so they were replaced by RAM based emulations.  And it may be
> that the original console display wasn't used because of worries of breaking
> it -- the design of that machine wasn't very good and it apparently has
> reliability issues.

As I was the original negotiator for the acquisition of the 6500 for LCM (not
yet LCM+L :-), allow me to chime in.

Paul Allen alerted me to the existence of a "surplus" CDC 6500 at the Chippewa
Falls Museum of Industry and Technology in early 2011.  (PGA was always on the
lookout for interesting systems, especially those with which he had a personal
connection.)  I spoke to several people at CFMIT, their BoD discussed the
possibility, and came back with a "No, thank you."

In early 2012, a management team was hired for the museum as we ramped up to
opening, consisting of an Engineering Manager and a Business Manager.  The
latter gentleman was an old friend of PGA and WHG, having been their boss when
they were PDP-10 programmers for the Bonneville Power RODS project; he also
negotiated the purchase of the Portland Trailblazers basketball team by PGA,
and a number of other deals along the way.  He picked up the 6500 acquisition,
convinced the BoD at CFMIT to sell PGA the system, and it came to pass.

We learned when it was delivered that the machine had been at Purdue for its 22
years of active service, from 1967 to 1989, and was purchased back by CDC to
donation to CFMIT, part of whose mission was to have at least one of every
machine designed by hometown boy Seymour Cray.  The CDC FEs used a Sawzall vel
sim. to remove all the interchassis cabling, since "no one will ever want to
run this thing again".

The Engineering Manager, who in previous life wrote the microcode for the XKL
Toad-1 System's XKL-1 CPU, hired a new Principal Engineer, Bruce Sherry, to run
the restoration of the 6500.  (Bruce designed the XNI-1 Ethernet board for the
Toad-1, then went off to Strobe Data to do designs like their Nova and PDP-11
clones.  He also designed the 2nd generation Massbus Disk Emulator at LCM.)
Bruce found that the company which originally built the cables still had the
Cray design files, so they could recreate them; the pins were silver rather
than gold or tin, so he had to buy a brick of silver bullion for the company
which made the pins (need: c. 10,000, minimum order: 50,000).

Bruce brought in a wonder worker from Strobe, the late David Cameron, to do the
wiring; between 2012 and 2020, when we closed down, we found *3* miswirings out
of that 10,000 or so.

Because of Cray's physical design for the memory, Bruce had to spec out a
plexiglass box into which he inserted a small memory card, in order to keep the
proper airflow characteristics in the memory bays.

Bruce's business card at LCM listed his title as "Technomancer".

Rich

Re: Early Programming Books

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2021 22:19:02 -0600
> From: ben via cctalk 

> LISP still can't be compiled.

May I respectfully suggest that you don't know WTF you're talking about?

LISP compilers have existed for decades.  One of the *early* MIT AI Lab papers
by Guy Steele is a comparison of the compiler for MACLISP (the Project MAC
dialect of Lisp, nothing to do with Apple computers) with the then current
FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-10 (called "F40"), in which the LISP compiler
generated better code than the FORTRAN compiler.

Things have not degenerated since then.

Rich

Re: Massbus - was: Re: VAX 11/750

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2021 12:37:25 -0800
> From: Josh Dersch via cctalk 

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 12:27 PM Al Kossow via cctalk 
> wrote:

>> On 2/25/21 10:43 AM, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:

>>> Oh this is fun stuff. Is there a specification write-up anywhere on the
>>> MASSBUS overall?

>> there is some documentation on bitsavers

>> the register descriptions were intentionally obfuscated to prevent cloning
>> that was figured out to make SIMH work

> Interesting... Is this obfuscation documented anywhere (beyond looking at
> SIMH code?)  I was working on an RH11/RPxx emulation for the Unibone that
> was partially working (and that I should really get back to...)

Hey, Josh!  You could ask our friends Keith Perez (Massbus Disk Emulator v1)
and Bruce Sherry (MDE v2) about it, or even ask me.

The primary obfuscation was a lie in the PDP-11 documentation which swapped the
names of two signals; this drove Keith nuts until I found the PDP-10 version,
which disagreed with the PDP-11 but agreed with what he saw on th elogic
analyzer.  I used to remember which two signals were involved; I'd probably be
able to recall if I could be arsed to go look at the manuals for a moment.

For those who don't know, we decided back in the early days of building Living
Computers: Museum + Labs that spinning rust with 40 year old bearings was going
to be problematical.  Add to that the fact that new media was no longer being
produced, and we had to do something.  My brilliant friend Keith sat down with
a logic analyzer and an RP06 attached to a KL-10, and proceeded to spend the
next two years (when not called on for other projects) creating a disk
emulator.  He used a Rabbit processor for the controller, and about half a
dozen PIC processors for scut work; we could provide up to 4 RP06 or RP07
drives at a time to the KL-10s with his prototype.

Later, Bruce came on board as the museum was ramping up, and redid the design
in a Xilinx chip with VHDL.  His was fast enough to support up to 8 RP06 or
RP07 drives (the max on a single channel); he also did a variant which could
emulate up to 8 Massbus attached tape drives, of the TU78 type.

As for operating system support, the only DEC operating system which could put
tapes and disks on the same Massbus was TOPS-20.  Tops-10 explicitly tells you
in the SYSGEN process that disks and tapes must reside on different channels; I
believe that ITS follows that same principle.  WAITS, although originally a
highly divergent offshoot of Tops-10, took the Massbus code from TOPS-20 v5
when it was ported to a KL-10 at SAIL, so could in theory have disk and tape on
the same channel.

At LCM+L, because the emulators acted as both controllers and peripherals, we
had to devote separate channels to disk and tape, even under TOPS-20, but it
was the hardware, not the OS, which required that.  We also had to use two MDEs
on the KL-10 boxes; since dual channel disks were not possible, the front end
11/40 needed its own MDE.

We eventually put Bruce's MDEs on the DECSYSTEM-20 (running Tops-10) and the
other KL-10 (running WAITS), the PDP-11/70 running Unix v7, the KI-10 based
DECsystem-10 running Tops-10 v6.03A, and the MIT-AI KS-10 which was purchased
from CZ way back in the early days.  (I rebuilt the RM03 power supplies and
replaced the HEPA filters on them while Keith was working on the first MDE.)
We also sent one to Michael Thompson to repay him for lending us some hardware
back in the early days.

Rich

P.S. We're about 10 days from the 1st anniversary of the closing of LCM+L to
 the public.  Lift a pint in memory of the most fun we ever had standing up.

Re: Adventures online

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

Well, they started with the PDP-10 ZORK, and used PDP-10 (architecture) systems 
to develop many of the others...

Rich Alderson
ex-Living Computers: Museum + Labs

http://www.panix.com/~alderson/

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 23, 2020, at 10:26, Lars Brinkhoff via cctalk  
> wrote:
> 
> Chuck Guzis wrote:
>> Well, if one wanted to stay historically accurate, one would use a
>> PDP-10.
> 
> It's not Crowther's Adventure, but the Infocom games.
> 

Re: Adventures online

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> On Jul 23, 2020, at 10:47, Chuck Guzis via cctalk  
> wrote:
> 
> On 7/23/20 10:25 AM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
>> Chuck Guzis wrote:
>>> Well, if one wanted to stay historically accurate, one would use a
>>> PDP-10.
>> 
>> It's not Crowther's Adventure, but the Infocom games.
> 
> Infocom's games were based on Crowther, after all.   I remember porting
> the PDP-10 FORTRAN to CDC 6000 SCOPE 3.4. I got the source from a friend
> who was a DEC CE.   After converting the source tape, the "save game"
> was probably the biggest difference in implementation.  I used FTN
> (FORTRAN extended) to do the deed, rather than RUN.
> 
> After the game had been distributed at CDC SVLOPS, there was a concerted
> effort by management to purge the thing from all of the permanent file
> catalogs.  Luckily, management never discovered who introduced the game
> in the first place...
> 
> So yes, Adventure/Colossal Cave did run on an honest big mainframe.
> 
> I never played the game much myself, as I had access to the source, so I
> knew the innards of the game.
> 
> --Chuck

Loosely based, of course.

And Bob Supnik’s FORTRAN version was also ported to VM/CMS, so that’s two 
mainframes.

Rich Alderson
ex-Living Computers: Museum + Labs

http://www.panix.com/~alderson/

Sent from my iPhone

RE: On: raising the semantic level of a program

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Chuck Guzis 
Sent: Sunday, June 28, 2020 4:51 PM

> It's noteworthy that on the Univac 1100 series, a "byte" could be 6, 9
> or 12 bits, but not 8. (36 bit words).  The PDP-10 had similar issues,
> such as the "packed" string format of 5 7-bit characters per word, with
> one bit unused.

Of course, on the PDP-10, bytes can be anywhere from 1 to 36 bits long;
the size is defined in the pointer, not the hardware.

And in the 7-bit ASCII text format, bit 35 (the word is big-endian) *is*
used by the default editor:  In order to allow line numbering in source
files for languages which do not allow it, the line numbers are ASCII
strings with bit 35 set, and the monitor (=kernel=operating system) strips
them out before handing them to compilers' input streams.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
ex-Sr. Systems Engineer/Curator emeritus
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

Cell: (206) 465-2916
Desk: (206) 342-2239

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

NB: This e-mail address will cease working after 1 July 2020. Use 
l...@alderson.users.panix.com for future communications.

RE: Living Computer Museum

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

Just to make sure everyone knows that we haven't lost our minds:

Nothing is going in the skip/dumpster/e-waste recycling bin.  It's a long 
pause, that's all.




Rich Alderson
ex-Sr. Systems Engineer/Curator emeritus
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

Cell: (206) 465-2916
Desk: (206) 342-2239

http://www.LivingComputers.org/



-Original Message-
From: cctalk  On Behalf Of Electronics Plus via 
cctalk
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2020 9:00 AM


I sold a complete Displaywriter system with at least 7 terminals and keyboards, 
and a 3278 terminal with keyboard to them some years back. I hope those don't 
wind up in the skip!



-- 
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

Living Computers: Museum + Labs

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

Hello, everyone,

As I'm sure all of you are aware, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a crisis 
with devastating effects on many cultural organizations, and more especially on 
those which rely on public gatherings and special events to achieve their 
mission.  Since before we opened to the public in 2012, our philosophy has been 
a simple one:  To understand computing technology of any period, you need to 
experience that technology at first hand.

The current global situation has made it difficult for us to serve our mission, 
and given so much uncertainty we have made the difficult decision to suspend 
all operations of LCM+L for now.  We will spend the months ahead reassessing 
if, how, and when to reopen.  Because that will not happen in any short time 
frame, the staff, including me, have been laid off.

On a personal note, the last 17 years, since July 2003, have been a time of 
growth, excitement, and backbreaking labor which I would not trade for 
anything.  The friendships I have formed, in the community at large (and it is 
international in scope) as well as among my colleagues here, are a comfort to 
me.  I'll be subscribed from a personal address once that is moderator-approved.

Thank you all for your interest in and support for Living Computers: Museum + 
Labs, and our previous incarnations.  It means a great deal to us as we wind 
down the current implementation.


Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer/Curator emeritus
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

Cell: (206) 465-2916
Desk: (206) 342-2239

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Computing Folklore [Was: Re: ICL1501 Cobol manual available]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Classic CMP
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 9:21 AM

> I suspect that most of you will have spent at least a little time on Andy
> Herzfeld’s Folklore - https://folklore.org <https://folklore.org/>

> Like or loathe Apple (and Mr Jobs in particular) it’s an interesting read,
> and the way the site links the stories together based on author, topics and
> characters is very reminiscent of an old Hypercard stack.  I wonder if there
> would be any mileage in setting up something similar (using a Wiki, perhaps?)
> to capture some of the tales to be told, by the people able to tell them
> whilst they’re still willing to tell them?

Another good example of such a web site is Multicians.ORG, especially
the pages starting at https://www.multicians.org/multics-stories.html

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Make behavior on TOPS20 Panda distribution

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: David Griffith
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2020 2:41 AM

> I've successfully managed to get a simulated TOPS20 environment going with
> networking.  Now there's a new strange hitch: the behavior of make.  Would
> someone please look at this and tell me what I'm doing wrong?

> For a simple Makefile, it works fine if I just type "make", but if I type
> "make ", I get the commands sent to the command line, but no
> responses.  The display then stalls at the eighth source file.  Strangely, if
> I scroll up in the xterm, it gets dragged back down as if more stuff is being
> printed.

"make" is not native to TOPS-20, and is unknown to the vast majority of TOPS-20
programmers.  The best thing to do is to get the source for make and run it
under DDT to see where it's failing to perform as you expect, and fix it 
yourself.

It is unfortunate that Unix make was ever ported to TOPS-20, because there was
already a MAKE command which invoked TECO with an empty buffer.  This is the
source of the joke response to "MAKE LOVE"; it has nothing to do with your
issue with the Unix program.

Instead of using a badly ported Unix program, you ought to learn to build
TOPS-20 control files and do your compiles that way.

Just my $0.02.

Rich

RE: getting your data from yahoo

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Richard Schauer
Sent: Saturday, November 02, 2019 7:08 AM

On Sat, 2 Nov 2019, Rich Alderson via cctalk wrote:

>> What tool do I use to look at the contents of this verschlagener file?

> I also asked for and got one of these files.  Mine took something like 30 
> hours, and gave me a 584 MB .zip file.  I tried it using a Windows 10 
> machine, and it consists of directories, each with the name of a group I'm 
> subscribed to.

Thanks, Richard!  That was sufficient hint.

I simply renamed the downloaded file with a .zip extension, and Windows 7 gave
it a compressed folder icon and opened it right up on a double click.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134


http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: getting your data from yahoo

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

OK, Yahoo took more than 24 hours, but finally handed me a link to download my 
e-mail.

It's a 462MB .archive file.  zcat tells me that it's multipart, and only 
unloads the first part (which contains about 10 messages as .eml files).

What tool do I use to look at the contents of this verschlagener file?

Thanks,
Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134


http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: 50 yrs. ago today

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Liam Proven
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2019 10:01 AM

> On Tue, 29 Oct 2019 at 17:32, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
>  wrote:

>> 50 years ago, inter-computer communication was common enough that it was
>> a standard option in most vendors' catalogs.

>> Maybe you've got a digit wrong?

> Tim Berners-Lee says it's the 50th anniversary of the first internet
> packets. I believe him more than pretty much anyone.

> It's also in multiple computer news stories today.

> The historic event was comms between heterogenous computers over a
> standardised protocol (IP, I think).

Internet Protocol (IP) was developed in the very late 1970s, with the cutover
of the ARPANET taking place 1/1/83.

Prior to that, the underlying protocol was the one developed by Kleinrock et al.
for the BBN IMP hardware.

> Quit splitting hairs, folks.

New to this list, are you?

Rich

IBM 1500 [was RE: Vintage Computer Warehouse Liquidation]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: William Donzelli
Sent: Saturday, October 26, 2019 6:45 PM

> PICTURES! PICTURES! PICTURES!

>> I have been unable to find anything about the 4505 display station. Does
>> anyone know any details about this item? It resembles an IBM 2260, but the
>> keyboard is not built-in, as in the 2260.

> I think it may be for an IBM 1500, the educational system based on an 1130.

The 1500 I worked with at the University of Texas School of Education was based
on an 1800 (which is of course the same architecture as the 1130, but in highboy
industrial cabinetry rather than a desk.  Coursewriter II and APL\1500 for the
educational software, FORTRAN II and assembler for background tasks.

Rich

RE: LISP implementations on small machines

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Mark Kahrs
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2019 7:24 PM

> The first implementation was done for the 7090 by McCarthy (hence CAR and
> CDR --- Contents of Address Register and Contents of Decrement Register).

In the 70x series of IBM scientific systems (704, 709, 7040, 7090, 7044, 7094),
the word "register" referred to memory locations rather than to the accumulator
or multiplier/quotient.  Each memory register was 36 bits long, and could be
treated as 4 fields: A 15 bit address, a 15 bit decrement, a 3 bit tag, and a
3 bit index selector.

In the earliest implementation of LISP, there were 4 functions which returned
the different parts of a register: CAR, CDR, CTR, and CIR.  These were
abbreviations for "Contents of the {Address, Decrement, Tag, Index} PART OF THE
Register", not "Contents of the {Address, Decrement} Register" as is so often
misstated.

Rich

NB: Information from a talk given on the history of Lisp by Herbert Stoyan at
the 1984 ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming Languages, and later
verified by personal inspection of the code.

RE: DEC RP04 service manual available

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

> From: Noel Chiappa
> Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2019 10:10 AM

>> From: Evan Koblentz

>> I know of two RP04 drives in the wild. One belongs to a private
> > collector. VCF has the other.

> Right, but does VCF need it scanned?

> Oh, one other place that might have one: the MIT MC KL10 had a couple of
> RP04's; when it was taken away to Scandanavia, they might have gone with it.
> I think that machine is now at LCM?

Yes, and having the RP04 manual scanned would probably be long term helpful.

    Rich



Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134


http://www.LivingComputers.org/

mid-range IBM systems [was RE: IBM Series/1]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Jay West
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2019 10:38 AM

> I used to run a system at Anheuser-Busch in the late 80's, ISTR it was a
> 4331, 4341, or 4381.

The 4331, 4361 and 4341 are slightly more than waist high.  The 4381 is a
high-boy cabinet.

Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134


http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: "half-dollar"/"50 cent piece" Was: Recovering the ROM of an IBM 5100 using OCR

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Fred Cisin
Sent: Saturday, June 29, 2019 6:57 AM

On Sat, 29 Jun 2019, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:

>> US currency is very confusing to me. All the notes seem to be the same size
>> and colour, so you can't readily sort them. I mean, I know America doesn't
>> believe in helping people when they're sick, but it wasn't until I visited
>> that I realised you saved up particular hatred for the blind and
>> partially-sighted and went out of your way to make life more difficult for
>> them.

> USA paper currency used to be the size of punchcards.  So, if one were to 
> have a LOT of it, you could use the same trays, and counting machines, 
> etc.  Do you suppose that Hollerith had a lot of paper currency?
> "If Hollerith were alive today, how many birthdays would he have had?" 
> requires being aware that 1900 was NOT a leap year.

Actually, Hollerith designed his card that size precisely so that storage
drawers for bank notes could be used.

>> You use nicknames for 2 denominations which most of us foreigners don't know
>> -- I still don't know which is a "nickel" (which is a metal to me) and which
>> is a "dime" (which is a Swedish chocolate-covered sweet bar, of which I'm
>> very fond but can't eat because I'm overweight).

> A "Dime" is one tenth of a dollar.  Or ten cents.  Or $10 worth of drugs.
> The coin is 17.91mm diameter, and the smallest coin in circulation.

The name comes from an old French coin (pre-Republic)

> A "Nickel" is five cents.  or $5 worth of drugs.
> The coin is 21.21mm, and is between a penny and a quarter in size.

The $0.05 coin is a nickel-copper alloy.  At one time, an easy way to
distinguish between US and Canadian nickels was that the nickel content in the
Canadian coin was higher, enough so that a magnet would pick them up.

In the 19th Century, $0.05 was a silver-copper alloy coin like the $0.10 dime,
$0.25 quarter, and $0.50 half dollar.  (The silver dollar was something like
0.997 pure silver.)  There was a nickel-copper $0.03 coin called, astonishingly
enough, a nickel.

> "Silver Dollar pancakes" are actually larger than a silver dollar, but 
> nobody complains.

>> And the base unit is a cent, but you call them "pennies", the base
>> unit of _my_ old country's currency, and you didn't even put the
>> symbol into ASCII.

Yes, "cent" because they were $0.01.  "Penny" because that was what the small
coins were called.  There was no need for ha'farthings, farthings, ha'pennies
in the Brave New Decimal Currency!

> Pennies used to be copper.  Now, they are mostly zinc, due to copper 
> costing more than a penny.  But, they managed to maintain the copper 
> color.  During WW2, pennies were briefly made out of steel.

Technically, they were bronze, a copper-tin alloy.

In 1943, at the height of the war, zinc-coated steel pennies were issued.
In 1944, there was a return to bronze, but the coins were a different color
because expended artillery shells were melted down for the metal, and had a
higher tin content.

> 6 decades ago, pennies said "One Cent" on the back, with pictures of 
> wheat; then they changed to a picture of the Lincoln memorial, which is at 
> the end of Memorial bridge in Washington, DC.

>From 1909 until 1959, the Lincoln penny had the wheat ears.

(The nifty thing about the image of the Lincoln Memorial is that on new enough
pennies one can see the statue of Lincoln in the center of the Memorial.)

Sometime in the 1970s, IIRC, pennies became copper (or bronze) coated aluminum.
Pennies will never stop being minted--the members of Congress representing the
state of Illinois would not stand for it.

Prior to 1909, for I forget how long and I'm not going to look it up, the
obverse of the penny had an image of an "Indian" head--which was actually the
image of the sculptor's daughter wearing a feather headdress.

OB vious:  Someone was an avid coin collector as a kid.

Rich

RE: Which DEC machine made use of th pre Flip-Chip board?

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2018 5:19 AM

>> From: Mattis Lind

>> I cannot figure out which early machine it comes from.

> They're called 'System Modules':

>   http://gunkies.org/wiki/System_Module

> and they were used from the PDP-1 through (I think) the PDP-7; at least, this
> PDP-7 internals image:

>   
> https://www.soemtron.org/images/jpgs/decimages/sn113robertjohnson85680004.jpg

> seems to show System Modules at the top, and FLIP CHIPs at the bottom. (I'm
> pretty sure even the first PDP-8 - the 'straight 8' - uses only early FLIP
> CHIPs - transistorized ones.)

Noel,

The PDP-7 was the first system produced by DEC which used Flip Chip(TM)
technology, as well as the first to be built using a Gardiner-Denver wirewrap
machine instead of hand soldering.

The System Modules(TM) in the PDP-7 chassis at LCM+L make up the 550 DECtape
control for the 555 DECtape drives.  The controller was common to the PDP-7 and
the earlier PDP-4 (which was of course all System Modules).  They appear in
exactly one place in the entire system.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Ethernet names...

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2018 5:49 AM

>> From: Eric Smith

>> 3 Mbps was sometimes referred to as experimental Ethernet, but AFAIK
>> the only official name was "Ethernet".
>> The best way to refer to it is probably "3 Mbps Ethernet".

That's what almost we call it here at the museum.  We have a Xerox PDP-11 3Mbit
Ethernet interface board in the front end of a DEC 1095 running WAITS, and a
3Mbit<->10Mbit bridge device that allows the Altos to talk to WAITS.

> I was trying to remember what we called it at MIT (which had one), but my
> memory was hazy, so I want back and looked at the sources for the packet
> switch I wrote (which supported the first Ethernet, before the 10Mbit version
> even came out), and I found (slightly to my suprise) that it was "3Mbit
> Experimental Ethernet", or just plain "Exerimental Ethernet". (Of course, that
> was just MIT - other sites may have had different terminology.) No doubt we
> renamed it once the 10Mbit version showed up - I can probably search for early
> versions of the code to confirm this, if anyone cares. Anyway, I'd vote for
> the latter, short name.

At Stanford, we tended to call it the "PUP Ethernet" after 10Mbit came in.

>> From: Bill Degnan

>> See where wizards stay up lote by Katie Halner and matthew lyon.

> Interesting! It looks (from the Notes) like this was gleaned from an interview
> with Metcalfe, and she was _very_ careful (I helped her with the technical
> details - you can find me in the Acks), so I'd tend to believe it.

> My _guess_ is that was his early, 'in his head' name for the thing, and when
> they set out to actually build it, it was re-named 'Ethernet' (as Al's memo
> search seems to indicate).

Of course, the very first baseband cable network at PARC was 1 megabit/second;
It may be that that is what got an Aloha name.  But that's *my* guess.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Australian Computer Museum in trouble.

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Toby Thain
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2018 11:31 AM

> Or I may be confusing with other Australian evictions:

> https://www.theage.com.au/technology/chips-are-down-for-computer-museum-20030520-gdgsdr.html

> The Villawood location seems to be distinct from the warehouses that the
> ACMS maintains?

> http://www.acms.org.au/warehouse.html

> Presumably they couldn't help out, even though Homebush is only a suburb
> away.

May I point out that this *IS* the ACMS, according to Mr. Geremin's signature
in the original post?

John GEREMIN, Honorary Treasurer, 0427 10 20 60.
Australian Computer Museum Society Inc.
PO Box 4005, Homebush, NSW, 2140.


Rich
    

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Thicknet/10base5 Test Segment: The Cable is In!

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2018 3:43 PM

> On 06/29/2018 02:30 PM, Ethan Dicks via cctalk wrote:

>> When we wired up two different locations for terminals at Software
>> Results Corp in the 80s, the furthest runs were 250' or so.  9600
>> baud, from VT100s back to Emulex and DEC serial muxes.  The long runs
>> were 25-pair telephone cable (CAT3) and  Nevada Western modular wiring
>> products at the user and and in the middle (silver satin patch cords
>> and 6p6c jacks and receptacles).   Total port count was over 50 to 4-5
>> machines and to 20+ offices.

> That was a very common setup in the 80s.   25 or 50 pair phone cable
> running through the usual wiring closets and punch-down blocks.  Simple,
> and something that installers could understand.

In fact, both of the LOTS sites (the original, in the CERAS building, and
LOTS Two in the old bowling alley at Tresidder Union) were wired this way.
I learned to use a punchdown tool my first day on the job.

Rich
    

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Whence 556?

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Shoppa, Tim
Sent: Sunday, June 03, 2018 10:35 AM

> The 729 CE manual quotes 555 BPI. I’m not sure when it became 556.

> http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/magtape/729/223-6845_729_CEman_1959.pdf

> The IBM 728 was 248 BPI. Before that it was the nice round number 200 BPI.

> I tried permutations of standard IPS and round number data rates and don’t
> see anything that yields exactly 556BPI.

Just to add to the mists and smoke and chaos:

For decades, I remembered the lowest density for magnetic tapes as 225 bits/in,
not 200.  I have never been able to find the number "225" in any manual since
starting the project which became the museum 15 years ago (sob!), but it still
hangs around in my mind and pings whenever I see "200BPI" mentioned.

Anyone else ever encounter that?

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: DEC RSX-11D and its COBOL compiler?

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Paul Koning
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2018 6:47 AM

> I once saw an RSX-15 kernel listing, which had a lot of very familiar
> looking data structures -- it implied that RSX-11/D had its origins,
> at least as far as overall design is concerned, in RSX-15.  

RSX-15 was the predecessor of RSX-11/A, which was a port to the newer
architecture.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Old newsreader source code

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Seth Morabito
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2018 9:23 AM

> As an aside: If you were active on Usenet in 1989, what software were you
> using?

1988-89 is about when I started reading Usenet newsgroups.  At first, I used
rn under Ultrix (on a VAX 3600, the staff Ultrix system at LOTS), but soon
switched to Gnews (different from GNUS) under Emacs 18.59 because it saved
messages into an RMail format mailbox file for later access.  Once I had that I
almost never used any of the Unix-y newsreaders.

(I had to switch to GNUS when Emacs 19 came out, but that's another story.)

Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Old Classiccmp archive

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Dennis Boone via cctalk
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2018 2:50 PM

>> Does anyone have an archive of classiccmp that goes back to the 90's?
>> If so, could I ask you to "hunt down" an old message of mine?  I once
>> wrote a "reminiscence" of connecting to the ARPANET when I was a kid
>> that I was rather pleased with.  Unfortunately, I seem to have lost
>> it in a disk crash (actually a couple of disks, primaries and
>> backups).

> This one?

It would be amusing to see the headers from the message, too.

Rich

RE: Bug-for-bug compatibility [was RE: SimH DECtape vs. Tops-10 [was RE: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]]]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Doug Ingraham
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2018 9:53 AM

> This is a great story!  And it probably indicates that when developing the
> Toad-1 this particular diagnostic was never run from an original DEC generated
> tape or the Toad-1 would have failed the diagnostic.  Alternatively assembling
> the diag on the restoration project would have yielded a working multiply.

As it happens, this diagnostic is KI-10 specific, so no recompilation of the
KL-10 diagnostics would have caught it.

In addition, because the XKL-1 CPU was supposed to be identical to the KL-10,
it needed to pass the diagnostics *as provided* for the KL-10.

> So is someone going to fix the multiply instruction in the 20+ year old Toad?
> 

Actually, they tried, but because they had stopped using the Toad-1 several
years earlier (and donated all the remaining spare parts to the museum), they
had no way to test in-house, and limited cycles for developing a fix.  If we
ever need to recompile diagnostics for the KI-10 (or, mirabile dictu, a KA-10!)
we'll use a Toad-2.

Rich

Bug-for-bug compatibility [was RE: SimH DECtape vs. Tops-10 [was RE: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]]]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Paul Koning
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 12:19 PM

>> On Feb 26, 2018, at 12:06 PM, Doug Ingraham via cctalk
>> <cctalk@classiccmp.org>> wrote:

>> The purpose of an emulator is to accurately pretend to be the original
>> hardware.  It doesn't matter that the original OS runs on a particular
>> emulator.  If a program can be written that runs on the original hardware
>> but fails on the emulator then there is a flaw in that emulator.

> That's true.  But it is unfortunately also true that creating a bug for bug
> accurate model of an existing machine is extremely hard.

This is true even in real hardware (or "real" hardware, if you prefer), whether
bug-for-bug or simply correct results for corner cases.

The XKL Toad-1 System was designed to be a superset clone of the KL-10 based
DECSYSTEM-2065 from Digital Equipment Corporation.  It implements the full
30-bit extended addressing introduced with TOPS-20 v4, of which the KL-10
provided a 23-bit subset, and provides native support for 10Mbit Ethernet and
FASTWIDE differential SCSI2 (both state of the art in 1991 when the design was
frozen).

As a better DEC-20, the Toad-1 was a success.  (We will leave aside the issue
of its market failure, which is irrelevant to the story.)

Fast forward 20 years, to Living Computer Museum, where a KI-10 based DEC-1070
was undergoing restoration.  Diagnostics were needed, so the resident TOPS-20
programmer laid hands on the MAINDEC sources for the KI-10 and proceeded to
compile them all and generate paper tapes of the results.  All went smashingly
well until the multiplication test.

The diagnostic source for this test uses a macro to build a set of test values
for X**2 where X is a power of 2.  Internally, Macro-20 uses the IMULM
instruction to build the results.  In the KA-10 manual, IMULx of 2**35 * 2**35
is supposed to store the high order part of the result into the 36 bit word
addressed by the instruction, and set the overflow bit.

On the Toad-1 (and on the Toad-2 prior to our discovery of this bug), a zero is
stored instead.  Since we compiled the KI-10 diagnostics on the Toad-1, this
incorrect result was placed on the diagnostic paper tape, and the KI-10 seemed
to fail the diagnostic.  Imagine our chagrin when days of trying to correct the
problem led to the conclusion that the diagnostic was incorrect.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

SimH DECtape vs. Tops-10 [was RE: Writing emulators [Was: Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!]]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Paul Koning
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 6:41 AM

> And while there is roughly-accurate simulation of DECtape in SIMH (presumably
> for TOPS-10 overlapped seek to work?)

It's not for Tops-10.  SimH only provides the KS-10 processor[1], so DECtape is
not a possible peripheral.

Rich

[1] Although there is a KA-10 in the works.

RE: Writing emulators (was Re: VCF PNW 2018: Pictures!)

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Guy Sotomayor Jr
Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2018 11:24 AM

>> On Feb 21, 2018, at 10:59 AM, Paul Koning via cctalk 
>> wrote:

>> Typically you'd emulate the I/O device functionality, regardless of whether
>> that is implemented in gates or in co-processor firmware.  That's the
>> approach taken with the MSCP I/O device emulation in SIMH, or the disk
>> controller emulation in the CDC 6000 emulator DtCyber.

> It’s also what’s done in Hercules (S/370, 370/XA, 390, Z simulator) and the
> mainframe I/O is complex to say the least.

Also the method used by the KLH10 emulator (KS-10, KS-10/ITS microcode, KL-10).
There, each device type runs in a separate fork, using System V style memory
mapping.  This of course means that it only runs under certain Unix variants.

Rich

RE: Foonlies

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Lars Brinkhoff
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 11:28 AM

> Al Kossow wrote:

>>> SUPERFOONLY   DESIGNED 1968-71
>>> 10,000 TTL IC'S
>>> 3 MIPS

>> Was this ever built? 10K ICs would have been bigger than the Livermore S-1.

> This says the Superfoonly was designed.  Doesn't say it was actually
> built.  Triple-I funded the construction of the updated design, the F1.
> 
>   "The original superfoonly was designed at Stanford, on an ARPA
>   contract, but Dave Poole, Phil Pettit, and Jack Holloway. There was
>   also a fourth whose role (I think) was to build the CAD system which
>   was used for the design. He later went to work for DEC. DEC took the
>   foonly design and lobotomized it, which became the KL10. The other
>   three came to Triple-I with a proposal to build an updated version of
>   the original design (using ECL instead of TTL).
> 
> http://dave.zfxinc.net/ddyer.html

The fourth guy was Dick Helliwell, who was hired by DEC when they licensed SUDS
from SAIL.  I met Dick when we both worked at XKL; he was the major part of the
effort to make SUDS run on the X Window System, on the KL-10 and later on the
Toad-1.  I'm going to disagree with the history Al posted, because Dick himself
told me the story.

He also ported Perl 4 and the GNU utilities and Emacs to TOPS-20.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: 3420 tape drive

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Pmungai Njau via cctalk
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2018 6:06 AM

> Am looking for the above tape to read and covert some old tapes from
> ebcidic to ASCII format. How can I get the tapes in Kenya.

Hi, Paul,

You do not need an IBM tape drive to convert from EBCDIC to ASCII; all
tape drives are agnostic about the meanings of the 8-bit data frames on
the media.  Data conversion is a function of the operating system or
utility used to read/write the data.

Your best option is to read the tapes as raw 8-bit bytes with any working
9-track tape drive into a data file and then do the data conversion using
a tool such as (GNU) dd.

Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: DL10 documentation

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2018 5:07 AM

> From: Phil Budne

>> I remember finding documentation on MC for "KLDCP" the original DEC
>> front-end software (suitably defaced) which DEC later replaced with a
>> modified version of RSX-11

> MC, on the other hand, ran KLDCP ('KL Diagnostic Console Program') until the
> end. (The sources of DEC KLDCP version 7 are still available from the MC
> dumps, if anyone wants them, along with the MIT-modified version.) The
> console -11 on MC ran a 'combination' of IOELEV and KLDCP - the two remained
> pretty much separate, just cooperated to share the machine:

>   KLDCP does JSR PC, [to 03000] when it has nothing to do and 10 is
>   running. IOELEV should INIT if it hasn't already, then go into its main
>   loop. It should CLC, RTS PC if the 10 goes down; KLDCP will print
>   appropriate message. To go into temporary KLDCP command mode, SEC, RTS PC.

> I get the impression from the IOELEV source that it ran on the -11 connected
> to the DL10 first (stand-alone, by itself), and was later adapted to share the
> console -11 with KLDCP.

> Amusing comment in the KLDCP source:

>   WE HAVE GONE TO CONSIDERABLE DIFFICULTY AND EXPENSE TO ASSEMBLE A STAFF OF
>   SORCERERS, SHAMANS, CONJURERS AND LAWYERS TO VISIT NETTLESOME AND MYSTIFING
>   DISCOMFORTS ON ANY NINNY WHO ENDEAVORS TO REPRODUCE OR USE THIS PROGRAM IN
>   ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING COMPUTERS AND
>   INFORMATION SYSTEMS, WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE DEVELOPER. WATCH YOURSELF!

The original KL-10 running WAITS in the SAIL tri-processor system was a 1080 as
well, and used a locally extended version of KLDCP for the front end rather
than a second program such as IOELEV.  This version of KLDCP includes Ethernet
support for the 3Mbit Xerox board, which provides PUP networking to WAITS.

We are looking at adding code to this version of KLDCP to allow setting the TOY
clock, a TCU-150.  (SAIL used a TCU-100 and a hack to get years from 1976-1991;
the TCU-150 provides a YEAR field in the date register.)  I find it interesting
that the SAIL folks never saw the need to do that. :-)

Sources for both the original and the WAITS variant are available for perusal
at SAILDART.org (Bruce Baumgart's site), and will be visible on our WAITS
system once we have IP networking going.

Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

Dec-10 Day announcement from Living Computers: Museum + Labs

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

Happy DEC-10 Day!

It is my honor to announce that we at Living Computers: Museum + Labs
are releasing to the computing community our Massbus Disk Emulator
and all the associated software.  This device connects via Massbus
cables to the RH10 and RH20 interfaces on KI-10 and KL-10 systems, to
the RH11 interface on KS-10 and small PDP-11 systems (including the
front end 11/40 on the KL-10), and to the RH70 on the PDP-11/70.  The
MDE provides up to 8 emulated RP06 or RP07 disks (represented by disk
files in the format used by the SimH emulation of these systems).

We expect that it will also work with the RH780 on the VAX-11/780 and
VAX-11/785 although we have not yet tested it in this configuration.

The original MDE was designed by Keith Perez in 2005, and emulated up
to four RP06 drives connected to a KL-10.  The current generation was
a redesign by Bruce Sherry in conjunction with the restoration of our
DECsystem-1070 in 2012, and initially provided eight RP06 drives on
the RH10.  It has undergone continual development, with associated
software created for us by Bob Armstrong, and is now being opened up
for the use of the relevant communities.

To this end, we have placed the design files for the hardware and the
source files for the software to interface with it, along with our
library of Universal Peripheral Emulator routines, on public access
repositories at Github.  The URLs for these repositories are

https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/MDE2

https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/MBS

https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/UPELIB

These are released under a very liberal license which will allow for
free use of the MDE by any interested party.

Happy Dec-10 Day!

Rich


Richard Alderson, Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

Cell: (206) 465-2916
Desk: (206) 342-2239

http://www.livingcomputerss.org/

RE: Details about IBM's early 'scientific' computers

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Rick Bensene
Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2017 11:59 AM

Grumpy Ol' Fred wrote:

>> Yes, 1968-1973 had time-sharing for personal computing, but not "personal
>> computers"

> While the definition of the term "personal computer" varies depending on who
> is using the term, these machines, and others like them, were designed to be
> used at a much more personal level than the large-scale mainframe machines
> housed in the glass-walled rooms where only "special" people were allowed
> anywhere near them.^^
  ^^

This, like "Multics never got out of the lab", is a bogo-meme.  (Thanks, Neil!)

People did not *need* to get near the mainframes in order to do their jobs,
unlike the jobs for which the small systems (and you forgot the PDP-11 in your
list) were created.  Most programming on mainframes was special purpose, batch
oriented, data processing connected to accounting systems (GL/AP/AR/PR), and a
lot of the rest was high intensity engineering (where at this level even
physics is engineering) which needed lots of data handling for short runs.  In
the latter environment, time sharing was a big win, because multiple people had
access to the system for their work, without needing a bunch of underpowered
systems assigned to individuals.

I grew up in the mainframe world.[1]  I liked the idea of timesharing, but it
was not important to my job until the administrative DEC-20 was hooked up to
the Amdahl v7 via the HASP/RJE front end package for the -20.  Suddenly, the
EMACS editor which was a toy for me until then because a way to generate JCL
and PL/I for the mainframe where my responsibilities lay.  I did not need to
visit the computer room (several miles away) to do my job.

Later, I became a systems programmer on those mainframes, and had physical 
access
to the computers--but not because I was doing anything physical to the hardware.

I realize that most people here have an ongoing love affair with small systems.
I just want to point out that there were other ways to accomplish some really
interesting hacks.

Rich

[1] My first use of a minicomputer (a PDP-11 of small size, running RT-11) came
in grad school, 10 years after I first started programming, in a
linguistics class on "Production of Speech":  We turned the -11 into a
speech synthesizer, for which it was perfectly suited.


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

CDC 6000 series transistors [was RE: Which Dec Emulation is the MOST useful and Versatile?]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Paul Koning
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2017 12:07 PM

> True if you have a TTL machine.  6600 is discrete transistor, and the actual
> transistor specs are nowhere to be found as far as I have been able to tell.

> But that doesn't directly relate to gate level emulation.  If you have gate
> level documentation you can of course build a copy of the machine out of
> actual gate-type parts, like 7400 chips.  Or you can write a gate level model
> in VHDL, which is not the most popular form but certainly perfectly
> straightforward.  Either way, though, you have to start with a document that
> shows what the gates are in the original and how they connect.  And to get it
> to work, you need to deal with timing issues and logic abuse, if present.  In
> the 6600, both are very present and very critical.  For example, I've been
> debugging a section (the central processor branch logic) where the behavior
> changes quite substantially depending on whether you favor S or R in an R/S
> flop, i.e., if both are asserted at the same time, who wins?  And the circuit
> and wire delays matter, down to the few-nanosecond level.

Paul,

I asked the Principal Engineer here, who has spent the last 3 years making our
6500 run, about transistors in the 6000 series.  He replied:

Near as I can tell, the 6500 uses 2n2369 transistors in a slightly shorter
version of the to-18 package. I have had good success with both the 2n2369
for replacements, and mmbt2369 for the modules I have re-manufactured.

Since the flip-flops are merely cross coupled transistors, if they are both
set at once, both outputs will be true. In my experience, the set and reset
run on different phases of the clock, so that doesn't happen.

What you see on the logic diagrams can be interpreted this way: Each arrow
is a transistor, with the emitter tied to ground. The base usually has
about a 150 ohm resistor. The circle or square is the collector pull-up
resistor, so in the example of the PC module in 1n15 of the 6500, there are
two gates that can set flip-flop 0, and they come in on transistor 15, and
17, and the other side of the flip-flop comes in on transistor 19. All
three transistor collectors are connected together to 1 pull-up. If the
output pin does not go anywhere internal to the card, there will be a 120
ohm resistor in series with a diode to ground on it. If it does go
somewhere internal to the card, they will leave off the resistor/diode, as
the load will provide it.

Hope that helps.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: SDS 940 BASIC (was Re: Which Dec Emulation is the MOST useful and Versatile?)

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Al Kossow
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 9:04 AM

> On 10/25/17 11:55 AM, Rich Alderson via cctalk wrote:

>> Noel, do have a reference for "some commercial time-sharing system in the
>> Boston area"?  From Paul Allen's autobiography, the Harvard system was
>> followed immediately by their move to Albuquerque, where they leased time on
>> the local school board's PDP-10, and that's what my friends who worked for
>> Micro-soft back then have told me, as well.

> Harvard had an SDS 940, which shipped with a version of Berkeley's
> timesharing system. Tymshare's version of that system was significantly
> improved, and included "Super BASIC". SDS's OS was replaced with Tymshare's
> at Harvard because the original was so bad, and so they were exposed to that
> version of BASIC. PA told me that was the influence for M-S's BASIC
> extensions.

Harvard also had a KA-10, which is what PGA's 8008 -> 8080 simulator ran on,
using the User UUO capabilities of the architecture and operating system:
Microprocessor 8-bit byte in the address field, and a user-defined operation in
the opcode field to do the interpretation/call the interpreter.  (The simulator
was originally written for the Traf-O-Data device, which was 8008 based.)  I
put the code on our Tops-10 system while he was writing the book, and the
version of BASIC we run on the Altair 8800 in the Exhibit Hall was compiled on
that system; it is not a Microsoft product.

I know about the influence of SuperBASIC; I did not know about the Harvard 940.
Thanks for the note!

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Which Dec Emulation is the MOST useful and Versatile?

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2017 11:12 AM

>> From: Kip Koon

>> Back in the day when Bill Gates and company 1st started out ... a B/W photo
>> of a young Bill Gates bending over the operator at what looked like a very
>> small computer. Maybe it was just a terminal. I don't remember. I understand
>> they did software development on a DEC PDP of some sort.

> The very earliest version of their BASIC was done on PDP-10's running TOPS-10
> - first the one at Harvard, and then some commercial time-sharing system in
> the Boston area.

Noel, do have a reference for "some commercial time-sharing system in the
Boston area"?  From Paul Allen's autobiography, the Harvard system was followed
immediately by their move to Albuquerque, where they leased time on the local
school board's PDP-10, and that's what my friends who worked for Micro-soft
back then have told me, as well.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: The origin of the phrases ATA and IDE [WAS:RE: formatting MFM drives on a IBM PC]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2017 1:46 PM

> As an aside, I picked up a 1986 Wren II full-height manual that discussed the
> drive and its various interfaces.  Sadly, IDE isn't one, but SCSI is referred
> to as "SASI Subset"; i.e. "SCSI (SASI subset)"

I believe that you're reading that backwards.  What it says is that this is a
SCSI-compatible device which employs only the SASI subset of SCSI commands, not
that "SCSI" is a subset of "SASI".

> That concurs with my observation that SCSI was initially an Apple convention.
> I can recall conversations about SASI vs. Apple SCSI.

And like Fred, I don't believe that it does any such thing.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

markup vs. word processing [ was RE: RIP Jerry Pournelle, the first author to write a novel on a computer Earl...]

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

I met Jerry once, at a BYTE-sponsored conference held at McCormick Place
in Chicago.  Colorful.  I already knew his writing, of course.  He will be
missed.

Now:

From: Guy Sotomayor Jr
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2017 4:59 PM

> I think it all depends upon how you define “word processing”.  For me I
> absolutely detest things like MS Word.  Probably because I started with
> markup languages.

> The first one was one that I wrote for the IBM 1130 so I could do a high
> school research paper (1974).  It was written in Fortran (sorry long gone)
> and the “paper” was all on punch cards and printed on a 1403 printer.  I did
> it mainly because it was a pain to keep track of how to format for footnotes
> and attributions.

I didn't think of it as word processing, but I did something similar at Ohio
State in 1974.  I worked on the consulting team (= "help desk") for the College
of Administrative Science, hired because I (a) knew COBOL from my high school
adventures and (b) knew Coursewriter III from my time at the University of
Texas Computer-Assisted Instruction laboratory.  I was supposed to write an
on-line Quick (Introduction to) COBOL.

At UT, I had seen text input for the Coursewriter II system (IBM 1500) done on
punched cards, and probably for the 360/50 running Coursewriter III but I
didn't have access to that computer room.  I thought that that was a really
good way to do it, and convinced my boss to let me create a program for the
same purpose using PL/I (my favorite language at the time).  A grad student
wrote the COBOL course, and 2 other undergraduates put his text onto coding
sheets in Coursewriter III markup for our 2 professional keypunch operators to
enter.

At first I had the ladies (and they were) entering multipunch TAB and similar
characters, but then I got an idea from the single Hazeltine 1500 in our
terminal room:  A CONTROL key!  I used 2 shift characters, a cent sign for
CONTROL and a dollar sign for SHIFT, with the pair in opposite orders for
characters themselves in course text.

Overall, it saved about 6 months over the previous regime of having
undergraduates typing course material in on 2741 terminals.  I was rewarded
with a big raise, from $3.35/hr to $3.50/hr.  Not bad for a college kid in 1974.

As it happens, I had tried using Coursewriter III for word processing (though I
did not know that's what I was doing) in the fall of 1973, entering the text of
"The Goblin Market" from the pages of (IIRC) the September 1973 issue of
_Playboy_.  I was not satisfied with the result because the fixed spacing on
the 2741 did not work well to mimic the fancy printing job in the magazine.

> At CMU I used Scribe that output to the XGP (Xerox Graphics Printer driven by
> a PDP-11/45).  This was the first time I used something where there were
> selectable fonts (1976).  At IBM *everything* was done with various versions
> of SCRIPT.  At this point I can’t recall but I believe a number of the IBM
> manuals were all done in SCRIPT.

I didn't encounter SCRIPT until I was in graduate school at UChicago, working
at the Computation Center.  My first programming job there (after I was
promoted from the help desk) was to update the program from using Wylbur-format
text internally to using SuperWYLBUR when the Comp Center went to the more
capable commercial product.  I used SCRIPT to create my Advanced Dungeons &
Dragons materials for a campaign I was running.

I believe that all the IBM manuals which use the 1403 TN train were done using
SCRIPT to produce camera-ready copy, but that's from hearsay.

> I then used Interleaf (a *high* end document publishing/management system)
> and then FrameMaker (before Adobe completely screwed it up and finally killed
> it).

Used FrameMaker at Cisco.  Loved the output.  Hated the proprietary file format,
which meant that nothing I did could be reused on another computer.

> I currently use LaTex for producing anything more complicated than an email.

Although I encountered TeX at UChicago (one of my office mates came from
Stanford and knew DEK), I didn't learn and use it until I got to XKL, where the
Toad-1 manual was done using LaTeX with local mods (thus TeX was necessary).  I
did the work on updating the Tops-20 JSYS manuals there, although they were
never released while I was working for Len.

(Oh.  I just remembered.  I *did* used infotex once at Stanford, for some
 manual I wanted in hardcopy, but I can't remember what for.  Different from
 LaTex just to be different, I think.)

I still prefer markup languages to word processing systems, but I'm kind of
stuck with Word at work, for obvious reasons.  While I was still a contractor,
back in 2003, I wrote all my reports in LaTeX and created documents with
pdflatex, which I consider a gift from the gods.

Rich

RE: tape baking (Rob Jarratt)

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Michael Thompson
Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2017 7:41 AM

> A while ago the Living Computers: Museum + Labs borrowed my LP20 controller
> so they could clone the boards for one of their PDP-10s. Since they went
> through that effort they must have a big line printer.

LP27, specifically.  An OEM'd BP1500 from Data Products.  The LP20 lives in the
front end of the 2065 running Tops-10 v7.04.

We have other big printers on other big iron, of course.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: DEC archives

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Rod Smallwood
Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:39 AM

> Stop this Policy and Budget nonsense and accept gracefully the help you 
> have been offered.

You speak as if this were Al's personal decision and policy.  It is not.
Museums are expected to adhere to a set of standards of care for their
collections, which are formally set out by relevant bodies; see, for
example, the British and US pages at the following URLs:

British:  http://www.museumsassociation.org/museum-practice
US:   http://aam-us.org/resources/ethics-standards-and-best-practices

In order for this work to be done by volunteers, they first have to be
vetted, and their work must be overseen by a professional (which costs
those scarce funds).  It might be done by unpaid interns who already have
training in proper cataloguing and preservation techniques, but they also
would have to be overseen by a paid professional.

More things have been accidentally damaged or destroyed by enthusiastic
amateurs than have ever been preserved with proper provenance, cataloguing,
and care.

I realize that this will cut no ice with you, but CHM has a responsibility
beyond your happiness with respect to preserving this archive, and Al is
correct to point this out.

Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Extracting files off “unknown” 8 inch disks. Any thoughts…

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Eric Smith
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2017 3:27 PM

> On Fri, May 5, 2017 at 3:02 PM, allison via cctech <cct...@classiccmp.org>
> wrote:

>> In the PDP-10 realm not less than a handful Tops10. ITC, more.

> TOPS-10 doesn't have any filesystems for floppy disks, though the KL10
> front-end PDP-11/40 running RSX-20F does, and there are utilities to access
> RSX and RT11 filesystems from TOPS-10.

Unsupported utilities.

Also, RSX-20F can only handle RX01 format.  An RX02 drive can be used, but
not an RX02 format diskette.

> AFAIK, the situation is the same for TOPS-20.  I don't have any idea
> whether ITS, WAITS, Tenex, or the Compuserve Monitor ever had any different
> floppy disk support.

TOPS-20 has no support for the front end RX01, nor does WAITS (which loads the
front end from DECtape, not floppy).  I doubt that TENEX does, since it runs on
KA-10 and KI-10 processors (front ends are loaded from the main processor, not
from their own peripherals).  ITS on the KL-10 is like WAITS, AFAIK:  DECtape,
not floppies.  I can't speak to the CI$ monitor or Tymcom-X.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Extracting files off “unknown” 8 inch disks. Any thoughts…

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Terry Stewart
Sent: Thursday, May 04, 2017 2:41 PM

> Just tying up some unfinished business.  Right at the beginning of this
> thread I said...

>> Guys in the building next door to me (a Science lab) have found some 8 inch
>> floppy disks.  They want to see what’s on them, or at least to archive them.
>> They have no idea what machine these disks were used with, or the software
>> was used to write the files.  They may be CP/M, or some other format
>> entirely.

> It turns out these disks are from a VAX machine. Assuming the OS is VMS, I
> scoured the Internet for something that might read them.

Stop there.

8" floppies on a VAX are more likely to be an RT-11 file system for the front
end PDP-11/03 than anything else you can think of.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Bitsavers size

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Shoppa, Tim
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2017 10:49 AM

> Ben asks:

>> Just how big is the server?

>> As a wish list, I've always wanted that as a offline set of DVD's for the
>> common stuff.

> The bitsavers archive is 267 Gbytes.

> So at 4.7G per DVD, it comes out to almost 60 DVD's.

> I remember a PDQ Bach radio quiz show where the prize was The Wagner Ring
> Cycle on convenient 45 RPM records.

I would suggest using Blue-Ray media, at 25GB or 50GB per disk.  We're then
down to 6 or 11 platters.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: If C is so evil why is it so successful?

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: allison
Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2017 3:18 PM

> BASIC, why is that the most universal language implemented on nearly every
> micro and many other systems.

Because it was the language offered on the GEIS timesharing system when a
private boys' school in Seattle decided to teach programming in 1969?  And
on the systems at HP where a young technician was working in 1975?

It's pretty much all down to my boss and his friend, and that guy from the
Bay Area.

Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Trip to CHM - Hotel/Restaurant Advice

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Rick Bensene
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2017 2:18 PM

> What I'm asking for is help/recommendations in terms of a good hotel to
> stay at that is relatively close to the museum.  I don't want to be in a
> luxury hotel, nor do I want to be in a dive.  I'd also like to be in a
> place that has a restaurant relatively close by (preferably within
> walking distance) that I could get some decent meals (breakfast/dinner)
> while I'm there.

There aren't a lot of hotels in Mountain View, and what there are are not
easily within walking distance of good food (In 'n' Out does not qualify).
Most are on El Camino Real.  Looking at one which I have used (Hilton
Garden Inn) for relative pricing, it's not available for your dates and
all the others I would point you towards are in the $250-$400/night range.
This is the heart of Silicon Valley, after all, and lots of business travel
ends up in these places.

You're at the height of the tourist season, too.  The place I stayed last
weekend in Milpitas for $130/night is $260 for your travel dates.

Sorry for not being terribly helpful.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: ben
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 6:28 PM

> On 3/16/2017 5:16 PM, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:

>> From: Chuck Guzis
>> Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 6:08 PM

>>> And people who weren't there can't understand why FORTRAN was the closest
>>> thing to a "portable" language...

>> Not even close to COBOL.  :-)

Preach it, brother!

> But was FORTRAN that portable?

Yes.

> Other than the IBM 1130 I cannot think of a small computer that had ample I/O
> and memory to run and compile FORTRAN. All the other 16 bitters seem to more
> paper tape I/O.

The PDP-8 family has compilers for both FORTRAN II and FORTRAN IV.  16 bits?
What could we possibly do with all that address space? ;-)

> I suspect 90% of all university computers ended up as IBM 360 systems. A few
> ended up with the VAX, but who knows what they ran.

FORTRAN.  FORTRAN D (DOS/360), F and G (OS/360), which were FORTRAN IV
compilers (retronamed "Fortran 66").  VAX/VMS Fortran 77, except most VAXen of
the day you seem to be talking about ran BSD Unix and Fortran was handled by
f2c.

I learned FORTRAN IV on an IBM 1401, a decimal computer, before moving on to
PL/1 and COBOL (and FORTRAN) on the System/360.

FORTRAN was, and still is, widespread, even if it doesn't look anything like
itself these days.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: I hate the new mail system

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Jay West 
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2017 1:31 PM

> We've been in the process of moving our datacenter. As a result, changing
> headers on this list has been the last thing on my mind priority-wise.

> Add to that, we still have a few machines to move that will require
> hand-reimplementation instead of just migration, and those have to be
> finished first (paying customers).

> Add to that... when THIS server gets reimplemented, the lists will be
> recombined and the above patch should not be necessary.

> So - given available time and priorities, I'd appreciate it if you could
> suffer the lack of fun for a few weeks or a couple months, whatever it takes
> me to (a) find the time and (b) to get it done. After that, I'm sure the fun
> will return. Thanks for patience and understanding!

Jay,

Thanks for putting up with the long, long discussion my original intemperate
complaint sparked.  (A good friend who's also on the list privately said to
me "See what you started?", weeks ago.)

Thank you as well for hosting all of this at no charge to the group's members,
something for which we are all grateful (even if it does not appear so from
time to time).

Having managed multiple mailing lists over the decades, I applaud your efforts
to keep this a vibrant, civil place to discuss broadly our mutual interests.

Best regards,
    Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134


http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Fwd: Re: Architectural diversity - was Re: Pair of Twiggys

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2017 11:27 AM

> On 03/17/2017 11:09 AM, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:

>> and, although we don't know when YOU were playing it, the march had
>> been around half a century, so was probably playing on the radio to
>> inspire Backus.  Does that mean that Dan. might be right about it
>> being the predecessor to FORTRAN?

> Valdres March has been around for more than a century--it's at least 113
> years old.

> So FORTRAN has some catching up to do.

> It wasn't until the microcomputer era with BASIC, I think that FORTRAN
> wasn't the first HLL to be contemplated for a new architecture.


"I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know
it will be called Fortran."

--Tony Hoare, winner of the 1980 Turing Award,
  in 1982.

RE: I hate the new mail system

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Dave Wade 
G4UGM via cctalk
Sent: Tuesday, February 28, 2017 1:52 PM

> "reply all" seems to put the original sender and the list in the "to:"
> field..

Thanks, Dave, Dennis, and js.

I had no reason to reply (all) to any of these messages, and the text in the
From: header is what is displayed by the mail system in use at the museum;
real headers are only visible by "opening" the message and choosing an obscure
function on the "ribbon" (and they're not displayed well then).  It used to be,
of course, that in order to reply privately, I had to hit a Reply button and
edit the resulting To: header manually; I still will have to, but now it's to
remove something rather than substitute it.

Sorry for the noise.

Rich

I hate the new mail system

[Rich Alderson via cctalk]

OK, it's official.  I rarely criticize mail interfaces, because they're usually
mostly innocuous.  However, today's change makes life a lot more difficult.

In the past, it was simple to direct a reply to an individual instead of to the
list because the originator's address was right there in the From: header.  As
of today, the list address is substituted for that, so that it is impossible to
respond privately unless you happen to have a bunch of old messages archived and
the person to whom you want to respond is someone who has written previously.

Is this a conscious choice, or a configurable with a different default setting
in a new mail system than was previously in place?  However it came to be, it
greatly diminishes communications quality (IMAO).




Rich Alderson

Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer

Living Computers: Museum + Labs

2245 1st Avenue S

Seattle, WA 98134



mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org



http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Yale renames Calhoun College for Grace Hopper

[Rich Alderson]

From: william degnan
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2017 8:16 AM

> On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 11:12 AM, Chuck Guzis  wrote:

>> Grace Hopper (if you've ever followed CODASYL or the COBOL language was
>> a very sharp lady who's long had my admiration.  Kudos to Yale!

>> http://news.yale.edu/2017/02/11/yale-change-calhoun-
>> college-s-name-honor-grace-murray-hopper-0

> that's fine, but the reasoning was totally political and narrow minded.

Since you've chosen to inject a political statement into the list, I will
point out that the naming of Calhoun College (which at Yale means "dormitory +
refectory + student workshops") has been a topic of debate for decades, since
before I was at the Graduate School 40+ years ago.  It wasn't a broadly noted
discussion, because it was mostly internal to students living in the college.
(I had an undergraduate friend who resided there.)

The student body at Yale has become much more diverse in the last decade, so
an old discussion took on more importance in the wider world.  The decision
to rename the college was taken after input from alumni as well as current
students, beginning more than a year ago.  Given the reputation of Yale, and
of the Ivy League in general, as a bastion of conservatism, I was genuinely
surprised with the overwhelming support for changing the name.  Once that was
decided, a long process of nominations was set in motion, comments solicited
from the Yale community, and I am quite pleased with the decision to rename
the college for a brilliant scholar who earned her master's and doctoral
degrees in the Graduate School.

So I dispute your characterization of the reasoning as narrow minded, or as
political in the sense you most probably mean.  Not everything that happens
has to do with current events.


Richard M. Alderson, III
A. M. (Linguistics), Yale 1977

KA-10 desirability [was RE: What's the rarest or most unusual computer-related item do you own?]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Lars Brinkhoff
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 10:53 PM

> Rich Alderson wrote:

>> Eric's got a KL.  If he had a KA, I would have tracked him down and
>> beaten him to a pulp to lay hands on it--and we're friends.

> This is the third time in a few weeks that I've seen people eagerly
> looking for a KA10.

The founder of LCM+L is Paul Allen.  A KA-10 based PDP-10 is the Holy
Grail, since it's the kind of system on which he and his friends (not just
Bill Gates, but four others from the same school) all learned serious
programming.  (They started, of course, with Dartmouth BASIC on a dialup
from GE Information Systems.)

> Is someone pulling strings behind the scenes?  CIA wants an upgrade for
> their PDP-3?

NSA, whose existence itself was classified Top Secret at the time of the
PDP-3 build.


Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 11:00 PM

> Eric Smith wrote:

>> The only part of a KA that I have is the main console switch and light
>> panel. The leadperson for the film Swordfish wanted to rent it from me,
>> but we weren't able to reach an agreement.  I have yet to see the film.

> I think there's only about ten seconds worth of PDP-10 goodness.

Some of the funniest dialog written, though.  "Cal Tech", forsooth!  :-)

> For a greater boost, check out the "Arpanet" episode of The Americans.

Hmm.  I'll have to look for that.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

LCM+L [was RE: What's the rarest or most unusual computer-related item do you own?]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Lyle Bickley
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 8:30 PM

> On Wed, 11 Jan 2017 17:34:51 -0800
> Al Kossow <a...@bitsavers.org> wrote:

>> On 1/11/17 4:45 PM, Brad H wrote:

>>> I wasn't even aware of the LCM until this thread  

I'm hurt.  :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

>> You mean "Living Computer: Museum + Labs" ?
>> http://www.livingcomputers.org/

>> They just changed their name.

> Thanks - didn't know that...

> Good for them!!! Their website has really improved as well.

Thanks, Lyle!  I've passed that comment on to the head of the internal team
that spearheaded the improvements as we worked on the rebranding, because
she knows who everyone involved was and I don't.  (The previous sites, both
LCM and PDPplanet, were done by an expert team--they really are good--who
were external and also not answerable to us.)

This was part of expanding from a single floor of our three-story building
onto the 1st (ground) floor, where we have educational labs, exhibits on
modern developments from the vintage machines on the 2nd, a real gift shop
and book store, and a small cantina.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: What's the rarest or most unusual computer-related item do you own?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2017 5:40 AM

>> From: Eric Smith

>> I have a computer of the type that Gates and Allen used for that early
>> development. :-)
>> I don't have it running, though.

> Really? Which model processor; KA, KI, KL?

Eric's got a KL.  If he had a KA, I would have tracked him down and beaten
him to a pulp to lay hands on it--and we're friends.

> PS: Apparently Gates and Allen at one point rented time on a commercial
> service in Boston to do development; anyone know who that was, and what
> machine/OS is was?

Nope.  They moved to Albuquerque as soon as the deal with MITS was done.
(Ed Roberts hired Paul as his VP of software development on the spot.)
They rented time from the Albuquerque school district, whose -10 had
unused capacity.  (Development of the BASIC interpreter was famously done
using the Harvard KA-10.)

They went from renting time on others' systems to owning their own when
they moved from Albuquerque back to Seattle.  Their first was a KS under
TOPS-20.

I have all this not merely from Paul's book, but from another friend who
was Microsoft employee #11 (who appears in the famous picture) and others
like David Bunnell at our grand opening.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Introduction to DECSYSTEM-20 PDF?

[Rich Alderson]

XKLeTen.PaulAllen.com changed names a long time ago.

Your account can be found on Toad-1.LivingComputerMuseum.org, and the PDF
is in DOC:.

Rich

-Original Message-
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Seth Morabito
Sent: Monday, December 19, 2016 9:54 AM
To: cctalk@classiccmp.org
Subject: Introduction to DECSYSTEM-20 PDF?

I'm looking for a PDF of "Introduction to DECSYSTEM-20 Assembly
Language Programming" by Ralph E. Gorin. It used to be hosted
on PDPPlanet (xkleten.paulallen.com), but that's been down for a while.
Does anyone else have a copy they could send me?

Best Wishes,

-Seth
-- 
Seth Morabito
s...@loomcom.com

RE: Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Lars Brinkhoff
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2016 3:54 AM

> Noel Chiappa wrote:

>>> 9-track tapes on the PDP-10 used one of the following encodings:

>> What about 7-track, any idea? I would assume 6 x 6-bit tape frames per
>> 36-bit word, but that's just a guess.

> A reasonable guess, and one I'd make too.  But I don't know either.

According to the monitor calls manuals for both Tops-10 and TOPS-20, as
well as the manual specifically on tape labels etc., that's a very good
guess, and a correct one.

> Supposedly, many ITS backups were made to 7-track tapes.  That became a
> problem when the old tape drives started to fail, and available new tape
> drives were only 9-track.

The same issue occurred at SAIL for the early WAITS backups prior to the
introduction of a KL-10 into the system (which grew from a PDP-6 to a
PDP-10/PDP-6 to a KL-10/KA-10/166, then shrank to a KL-10/KA-10 down to
a KL-10 only).  The KL-10 had TU-78 drives on an RH20.

AIUI, the older backup tapes were refrangled onto new 9-track media before
the KA-10 and its drives were retired.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2016 6:38 PM

> On Fri, Dec 9, 2016 at 12:47 PM, Rich Alderson <ri...@livingcomputers.org>
> wrote:

>> [1] For non-PDP10 programmers:  The original architecture of the PDP-6
>> and PDP-10 used an 18-bit (256KW) address space.  The KI-10
>> processor added a 22-bit pager and a concept of sections to the
>> hardware.

> As you say, the KI10 had 22-bit physical memory addressing, almost
> identical to the "KI paging" of the later Model A KL10.  There were two
> PTEs per 36-bit word in the page table, with the five of the 18 bits
> being the APWSX properties, and the remaining 13 being a physical page
> number.  The 13-bit physical page number was concatenated with the
> offset into the 512-word page (low 9 bits of the virtual address) to
> get the 22-bit physical address.

> However, the KI10 did not have any "sections". Sections were introduced
> with the Extended ("Model B", "KL paging") KL10.

I knew that was wrong just as soon as I had hit "Send", but I also knew
that I could count on one of the PDP-10 subgroup to fix that.

Thanks!

Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Phil Budne
Sent: Friday, December 09, 2016 10:44 AM

> Rich Alderson wrote:

>> There are also Two-Word Global Byte Pointers (which I've never seen
>> abbreviated) which carry the standard "any size byte at any position"

> Maybe they were just Global Byte Pointers?  OWG's were a late
> addition.  I was a member of the FORTRAN-10/20 v10 project to make it
> generate/run code in extended addressing...  It's tempting to look at
> the compiler and FOROTS to see what terms we used a the time...

Both One-Word and Two-Word Global Byte Pointers were added at the same
time as extended addressing, according to the HRM.  Simple "Global Byte
Pointer" would have been inherently ambiguous.

OWGBPs were a way not to increase the memory footprint of a program when
moving it into a non-zero section,[1] at the expense of some microcode.
In theory, a binary could be patched for use in a non-zero section without
a recompile, as long as it was using 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-, or 18-bit bytes.

>> Neither of those is entirely accurate.  9-track tapes on the PDP-10 used
>> one of the following encodings:

> 8-bit characters became more important near the end of PDP-10 software
> development.  ISTR TOPS-10 getting new 8-bit I/O modes, but I have a
> vague recollection that translation between 36-bit words and mag tape
> frames was handled by the "tape formatter" hardware, which means that
> writing two words with 8 bit bytes in way that was easily legible on
> 8-bit byte oriented hardware ("high density mode" was only "legible"
> for the even words).

Yes, all the translations are handled in the formatter, which is part of
the tape controller.  To continue the example, in Industry-Compatible
format, where the ASCII characters have been moved into 8-bit bytes in
36-bt words, on 9-track tape we have "HELLOworld" as

_HHH
_EEE
_LLL
_LLL
_OOO
_www
_ooo
_rrr
_lll
_ddd

In memory, this takes 3 words:

_HHH_EEE_LLL_LLL
_OOO_www_ooo_rrr
_lll_ddd

Rich


[1] For non-PDP10 programmers:  The original architecture of the PDP-6 and
PDP-10 used an 18-bit (256KW) address space.  The KI-10 processor added
a 22-bit pager and a concept of sections to the hardware.  When the
address space was expanded to 30 bits (1MW) on the KL-10 processor (in
anticipation of the KC-10 a/k/a "Jupiter"), it was done by retaining
18-bit local addressing and adding a 12-bit section number to provide
global addresses.  Section 0 is special, working like the older 256KW
memory space; non-zero sections can reference all of memory, with an
    18-bit address in a non-zero section being section local and a 30-bit
address referencing anything except section 0.


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2016 10:43 PM

> On 12/07/2016 12:46 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:

>> Neither of those is entirely accurate.  9-track tapes on the PDP-10
>> used one of the following encodings:

> The last time that I had to deal with PDP-10 tapes, admittedly also 40
> years ago was essentially core-dump format.  5 7-bit characters per
> word, with one bit unused; words packed end-to-end; i.e. 9 frames for 2
> PDP 10 words.

That sounds more like high density format, if there were 9 frames for 2
words (i.e., 72 bits total).  Core dump format would require 10 frames.

The 5 characters per word is irrelevant to a discussion of tape, whether
9- or 7-track:  That's how ASCII text was represented in memory, on disk,
on DECtape, or on any other word-oriented medium.  Representing the bits
in an ASCII character by the character itself (to make divisions on the
tape more clear), this appears diagrammatically as follows:

Text: HELLOworld

Memory:
HHHEEELLOOO_wwwooorrrlllddd_

Core Dump:  High Density:   SIXBIT: (7 track)
HHHEHHHEHH
EELLEELLHE
EE
LL
OOO_OOO_OO
wwwowwwoO_
oorroorrww
rlllrlllwo
ddd_oo
ddd_rrrlll
dd
d_

where _ represents the unused bit 35 in the word and . represents the
don't-care bits inserted by the tape controller/formatter for core dump.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: EMACS folly

[Rich Alderson]

Hi, Lars,

I actually met someone once who tried to implement an interpreter for TECO code
in Emacs Lisp, in order to load EMACS.:EJ and run it, just for the hack value.
I don't know whether he ever completed the project. :-)

We have a VAX-11/780-5 (a 780 field upgraded to a 785) running VMS 7.3.  It's
hard to get to because some botnet is constantly pounding on it with 10 
connections
per second, trying to break in.  It makes the LOGIN program time out on 
passwords.
If you would like to try bringing those up, use the account request form on our
web site and send me a note to let me know to look for the request.  I have not
been opening new accounts because of the frustration inherent in trying to log 
in.

I think I'm remembering the name correctly:  Pete Siemsen wrote a new PDP-11 
TECO
back in the late 1980s which he presented at the DECUS Fall Symposia in Anaheim
(so 1988, I think).  After his talk, a couple of us suggested that he try adding
the MIT TECO features to his program, and he said he'd give it a try.  I don't
know what ever came of that.

Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

Cell: (206) 465-2916
Desk: (206) 342-2239

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

-Original Message-
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Lars Brinkhoff
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2016 10:37 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: EMACS folly

Rich Alderson wrote:
> Well, sure, if you load the suckit.el library, but that's optional.  It's
> faster if you load the compiled suckit.elc instead.
>
> I prefer the compiled TECO variant BITEME.:EJ, of course!

Loaded into GNU Emacs? ;-)

Hey, do you have any VAXen over there?  How about getting an early Emacs
running on those?  I turned the Internet inside out to find Gosling
Emacs, BTL Emacs, and GNU Emacs 15 and 17, and and it would be a shame
if the source code was just sitting idle.

Or how about TECO EMACS?  Only not on the PDP family you'd expect, but
the 16-bit flavor.

RE: Odd "endianness" [was Re: RE: Base 64 posts to the list]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Chuck Guzis
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2016 6:15 PM

> On 12/05/2016 01:09 PM, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:

>> As Charles wrote, the PDP-10 commonly uses 7-bit bytes for ASCII
>> text, but that's only part of the truth.  The architecture is quite
>> byte size agnostic.  There are instructions to operate on any byte
>> size from 1 to 36 bits, at any position inside a word.  (Well, a
>> later extension to the architecture restricted this a bit.)

The restriction Lars mentions only applies to what are referred to as
One-Word Global Byte Pointers (OWGBPs), which encode the divisions of
a 36-bit word into 6, 7, 8, 9, or 18 bit bytes into a 6-bit value in
the high-order bits of a word with a 30-bit address filling the rest.

There are also Two-Word Global Byte Pointers (which I've never seen
abbreviated) which carry the standard "any size byte at any position"
in the first word, with a zero address in the right half, and the
30-bit extended address (with 0's in the 6 high-order bits) in the
second.

> I've seen PDP-10 9-track tapes done two ways--one character per frame
> and then 4 frames (36 bits) with 5 7-bit characters and the sign bit
> left over.

Neither of those is entirely accurate.  9-track tapes on the PDP-10 used
one of the following encodings:

1. Core-Dump:  4 frames of 8 bits, 5th frame with 4 leading 0's (or 0100
   on one type of controller) and the last 4 bits.
2. Industry-Compatible:  4 frames of 8 bits, and ignore the low order 4.
3. ANSI-ASCII: 4 frames of 7 bits padded with a leading 0, 5th frame with
   low order bit (B35) followed by the remaining 7 bits.  In this case,
   B35 is usually 0, but in the case of line-numbered files B35 = 1 is
   the indicator that the 5 ASCII digits are a line number (and the
   parity bit is set incorrectly on the tape).
4. High-Density: 4 frames of 8 bits, 5th frame has low order 4 bits of
   the 1st word in its high order bits + high order 4 bits of the 2nd
   word in its low order bits, then 4 frames of 8 bits finishing up the
   2nd word.

I've been dealing with PDP-10 tapes for 40 years now.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: RE: Base 64 posts to the list

[Rich Alderson]

From: Cameron Kaiser
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2016 6:35 AM

>>> Thanks for the suggestion. My delivery was set to MIME, I have changed it
>>> to plain text. Hopefully that will solve the problem.

>> What?  No format flame war?  What's this world coming to?

> emacs sucks!

> *waits patiently*

Well, sure, if you load the suckit.el library, but that's optional.  It's
faster if you load the compiled suckit.elc instead.

I prefer the compiled TECO variant BITEME.:EJ, of course!

;-)

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: Thinking about acquiring PDP stuff

[Rich Alderson]

From: Brad H
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2016 8:18 AM

> My Intellec 230 though might give a PDP a run for its money.

See, I'm trying to get you to stop saying "a PDP".  There's no such thing.
There are families of PDP-n things, but there are wide differences in size,
weight, and capabilities.

Your Intellec 230 would fit inside one memory cabinet of a PDP-10 with
room to spare.  The entire PDP-10 system weighs tons.

    Rich



Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Thinking about acquiring PDP stuff

[Rich Alderson]

From: Brad H
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2016 9:16 AM

> That was kind of why I thought buying a PDP in pieces over time might be my
> way to go, even if it took eons to get everything I needed to rebuild one.
> It'd be fun to try and piece one back together.  But yeah, I'm trying to
> think of what I would do with it afterwards. :)  

So what kind of system are you interested in?  There is no such thing as a
generic "PDP".  Before giving up the naming convention, DEC produced 7
different architectures all named "PDP-n" for small integers n (and designed 2
that were never built by DEC):

PDP-1:  18 bits, 6 instruction + 12 address (System Modules)
PDP-2:  24 bits (design only) (System Modules)
PDP-3:  36 bits (design only) (System Modules)
PDP-4:  18 bits, 5 instruction + 13 address (System Modules)
PDP-5:  12 bits (System Modules)
PDP-6:  36 bits, 9 instruction, 9 AC+index+indirect, 18 address (mainframe)
PDP-7:  18 bits (PDP-4 upwards compatible) (FlipChips)
PDP-8:  12 bits (PDP-5 upwards compatible) (FlipChips)
PDP-9:  18 bits (PDP-7 upwards compatible) (FlipChips)
PDP-10: 36 bits (PDP-6 upwards compatible) (mainframe)
PDP-11: 16 bits (FlipChips)
PDP-12: 12 bits (PDP-8 + LINC compatible) (FlipChips)
PDP-14: 12 bits (NOT compatible with the PDP-8 family) (FlipChips)
PDP-15: 18 bits (PDP-9 upwards compatible) (FlipChips)
PDP-16: register-transfer module machine, with 8-, 12- or 16-bit memory as
needed for particular application design.

Later members of each family were designated by suffixes (e.g. 8/i, 8/e, 8/A
and 11/40, 11/70, etc.) or newer names (DECsystem-10, DECSYSTEM-20).  The VAX
was the first new architecture from DEC not to have a PDP-n designation at all.

Rich

P. S. For most of us, I think, "DG" = Data General, not Digital Group.


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

curious claim questioned [was RE: Free IBM system/1(?) in eastern US.]

[Rich Alderson]

From: jim stephens
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2016 3:21 PM

> the Ultimate system was the only Non IBM written supervisor / system 
> that ran on mainframes at the time.

You're going to have to be more specific than that.  At what time?  On
what mainframe(s)?  Are you saying that by the time Ultimate, whatever
that is when it's at home, was running, no other non-IBM OSes were
running on IBM hardware, all others being dead?  Or that Ultimate was
earlier than, say, MTS on IBM hardware?  And are you claiming that no
other manufacturers' systems are mainframes?  What are you saying?

Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Doug Englebart - mouse!

[Rich Alderson]

From: jos
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2016 9:38 AM

> On 17.11.2016 17:18, Murray McCullough wrote:

>> Today in the age of pointer-graphics, ie., using a mouse, is a very
>> important day: Nov. 17, 1970, Doug Engelbart, of SRI, Menlo Park, CA,
>> invented the mouse or granted a patent for "X-Yposition indictator for
>> a grahics display." BTW he doesn't know who coined the word 'mouse'.

> Of course Telefunken had already a mouse, a.k.a. Rollkugel, in 1968.

Of course, the so-called Mother of All Demos was presented at FJCC on
9 December 1968, and included the mouse and the chord keyboard.  Unlike the
Telefunken mouse, the Engelbart mouse was not an inverted trackball.

I think arguing "priority" is a pointless exercise.  In the real world, the
mouse came to the fore with the Xerox Alto, where its use was inspired by
Engelbart, not Telefunken, and it spread to Lisp Machines, Lisa and Macintosh
computers, and beyond, from there.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Ave S
Seattle, WA 98134

Cell: (206) 465-2916
Desk: (206) 342-2239

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: VAX Common Lisp

[Rich Alderson]

From: Ian S. King
Sent: Friday, November 04, 2016 8:54 AM

> On Fri, Nov 4, 2016 at 4:10 AM, <asw...@t-online.de> wrote:

>> any idea where to get VAX Common Lisp?

> ISTR when I installed it on the VAX-11/780-5 at Living Computer Museum, I
> got it either from the hobbyist distribution or from the freeware
> collection at HP.  I know I didn't jump through any special hoops to get
> it.  In fact, I had both Common Lisp and 'Standard' Lisp installed.

Ooooh.  Standard Lisp.  Portable Standard Lisp (which is most probably what Ian
installed) was the first Lisp I learned after reading Weissman's _LISP 1.5
Primer_.  We installed it at the University of Chicago Computation Center as
part of making available the REDUCE symbolic mathematics package.  (IIRC, that
was on the Amdahl 470 under SVS, rather than on the DEC-20.)  That got me
interested in Lisp as a language, and I began hunting down all the different
implementations I could find.

The original Standard Lisp was an evalquote implementation--top-level loop is
the equivalent of

(print (apply (read) (read)))

rather than an eval implementation with a REPL

(print (eval (read)))

Portable Standard Lisp is an eval dialect, and contributed to the definition
of Common Lisp.  In addition, it provided an Algol-like alternative syntax not
unlike McCarthy's LISP 2 (the algebraic notation used in McCarthy et al. and
which McCarthy used to teach Lisp programming at Stanford until he retired).

Funniest thing is that we were having a Lisp programming discussion at the
museum just this morning, entirely unrelated to this ClassicCmp thread!

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Sean Conner
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2016 2:00 PM

>  MS-DOS had CP/M at its heart, and it had its fair share of virii (viruses? 
>  What is the plural of a computer virus?).

Viruses.

The Latin word _virus_ means "slime, poison", and is a collective noun, like
English _milk_ or _flour_ or _sugar_.  It did not form a plural at all.

Furthermore, it is a neuter (neither masculine nor feminine) o-stem noun, very
very odd because it ends in -us rather than -um in the nominative.  -us is
overwhelming the marker of a masculine o-stem, or occasionally of a masculine
or feminine u-stem (whose plural would be in -us), and very rarely of a
feminine o-stem, or often of a neuter s-stem (like _genus_ "kind", whose plural
is _genera_ "kinds").

The -i marker of nominative plurals is restricted to those masculine and
feminine o-stems; -ii is restricted further, to o-stems in which the stem vowel
is preceded by -i-, so _domus, domi_ "house, houses" vs. _genius, genii_
"tutelary spirit(s) attendant on a person from birth", _Julius, Julii_ "a
_gens_ (clan) name, members of the Julian _gens_", _Cornelius, Cornelii_, etc.

Neuters in all ancient Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and
Latin, end in -a (or a regular development from *-a).  Presumably, if one were
able to specify a plural in Latin of the word _virus_, it would by rule have to
end in -a.  But the speakers of Latin did not speak of discrete slimes, it all
being one to them, so we will never know.

The word _virus_ was used as a synonym for _venom_ as late as the early 20th
Century in English, as in Burroughs's description of the deadliness of the
_virus_ of Martian serpents (in _The Gods of Mars_), which confused me no end
when I was reading the Martian novels for the first time at the age of 14.  The
modern usage derives from the medical term _filterable virus_, referring to a
disease-causing agent which was unresolvable under a microscope but which could
be mechanically filtered out of water, unlike a poisonous chemical dissolved in
water.  The word _filterable_ was dropped at some point in the literature, then
electron microscopes came along which *could* resolve viruses, and we come into
the modern world.

More than you ever wanted to know, I'm sure.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/

RE: MASSBUS disk emulator (Was: Unibus controller for MFM disks)

[Rich Alderson]

From: Noel Chiappa
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2016 11:51 AM

>> From: Rich Alderson

>> Data was transferred via FTP over a 100baseT crossover cable connected
>> to a Slackware server; the Rabbit was able to keep up with 4 drives at
>> this speed

> Were the bits actually stored on the Slackware server, or was it just used
> to put bits on the 'drive' to start with? If the latter, what were the
> actual bits stored on? (I know, not that relevant, since this is the prior
> rev, but I'm curious.)

Stored on a big honking JBOD array (set up as RAID 5 in Linux), since an
RP06 stored as described is nigh on 900MB, and served up on that FTP link
from Slackware.

>> a Mesa 5i22 Anything I/O card (includes a Xilinx Spartan-III FPGA) that
>> plugs directly into the PCI bus in a server-class X86-64 box, and used
>> a revision of a separate driver/receiver card designed for MDE 1.0 to
>> connect to the Massbus

> Let me make sure I understand this; was there some sort of cable or
> somehow a connection from the Mesa 5i22 directly to the driver/receiver
> card, which was purely 'level conversion', with the Mesa doing the
> 'protocol' on the MASSBUS?  (I.e. they didn't communicate over the PCI
> bus?)

Yes, the d/r card is strictly level conversion, and the microcode in the
Xilinx does all the Massbus protocol.

>> a control program for the PC side which runs under Windows 2008/2012
>> Server.

> So the actual bits are stored on something (disk?) controlled by the PC?

Again using RAID 5 arrays on the PC servers, but PCI makes it a lot faster
than Ethernet.

Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: Remember Data Printer Corp?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Paul Koning
Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2016 7:09 AM

> Speaking of printer widths, the Dutch computer company Electrologica was
> odd in that their systems came with line printers that were 144 columns
> wide.  I've never seen that anywhere else.

The IBM 1443 printer, originally part of the 1440 system but available on
the 1800 system as well, was 144 columns wide.  Type bar rather than a
train like the 1403; moved back and forth as hammers struck the desired
letter.  Ugly ugly type face.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: SCSI Tape Emulator

[Rich Alderson]

From: Charles Anthony
Sent: Monday, October 10, 2016 12:53 PM

> Details: The .tap format is a series of tape records; each record is
> stored as a 2 byte byte count, the data (sometimes rounded to an even
> number of bytes), and a repeat of the 2 byte byte count. This format
> supports the basic tape record operations; you need to keep a pointer
> to the current record. A 'tape read' retrieves the byte count from the
> record pointed to by the pointer, retrieves the data, and advances the
> pointer to the next block. Tape marks are stored as 2 bytes of
> zeros. Skipping records forward is done by retrieving the byte count
> and calculating the new pointer value.  Skipping backward is done by
> backing the pointer up 2 bytes, and retrieving the 2nd copy of the
> byte count of the previous record, and calculating how far back to
> move the pointer. Rewind sets the pointer to 0.

Correction:  .tap format uses 4 byte counters, in little-endian order.
Order is not relevant for the EOF tape marks, of course, since they're
4 bytes of 0.

The older DECUS .tpc format uses a 2 byte counter, also little endian,
but only at the front of the record (no read backwards capability).

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

Ill-considered complaints [was: RE: early networking (was Re: G4 cube (was Re: 68K Macs with MacOS 7.5 still in production use...))]

[Rich Alderson]

From: Dale H. Cook
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2016 9:52 AM

> Please do not change the subject line in a thread. The subject line of
> this thread has been changed twice since it began as "68K Macs with MacOS
> 7.5 still in production use..." When you change a subject line the header
> information concerning the subject is unchanged, and that is what the
> list archives and some email clients go by. There are now three threads
> concerning different subjects archived as one thread at classiccmp.org.
> If you want to change a subject please start a new thread, and if you
> wish you can give the new thread a subject line such as "New Subject (was
> Old Subject)" to reflect its origin.

Actually, Mr. Cook, the standard for the last 35 years or so has been to
change the subject line, with the old subject in SQUARE BRACKETS with the
characters "was: " prepended.  Any decent newsreader or threading mail
reader knows how to deal with that, and threading is unbroken.  What was
broken in the messages about which you complain is the substitution of
parentheses () for brackets [].

See the subject line on this message for an example.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: 50 yrs. of Star Trek!

[Rich Alderson]

From: Murray McCullough
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2016 10:04 AM

> What role did Star Trek play in the rise of small computers that are
> so ubiquitous today? This science fiction series prognosticated many
> things but how many actually happened or am I expecting too much from
> a television show of 50 years ago?

ST:TOS didn't really envision small computers.  Systems like the M1 were
obviously modeled on the mainframes of the day, taken to a logical extreme
in which they were so powerful as to become self-aware.  (Compare Mike in
RAH's _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_.)

The communicators used in the same series actually did influence the
Motorola flip phone design--as stated by the designers at the time that
this device was introduced.  They recognized their early adopter audience.
But cell phone technology was in place a decade and a half prior to ST:TOS,
so the development of what became the flip phone was simply an instance of
Moore's Law in action, not a direct influence from the show.

Although a lot of young tech people of the 60s and 70s enjoyed Star Trek,
it was more a matter of world view than any direct influence on technological
developments.  The program was not, in the end, about, nor even particularly
friendly towards, technology.  Hi tech was simply the milieu within which
stories of interpersonal interactions, one on one or civilization to civili-
zation, could take place.  ("Wagon Train to the Stars", as Roddenberry
envisioned it.)

My $0.02.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: Tape imaging

[Rich Alderson]

> From: Chuck Guzis
> Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2016 9:05 AM

> On 08/10/2016 08:49 AM, Al Kossow wrote:

>> Even though the file size of a picture of the label may be bigger
>> than the data itself, it is incredibly important, especially wgt
>> provenance of the media (original disk, etc.)

> In particular, the simple TAP format (and its ilk) say nothing about
> the original recorded density or even the length of the tape.

> You'd think that might be important to someone.

It's too bad that the Time Capsule File System invented more than twenty
years ago at MIT never took off:

http://www.boogles.com/local/papers/tcfs-thesis/thesis.html

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Rich Alderson]

From: Fred Cisin
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 9:47 AM

> On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Kip Koon wrote:

>> So I went on a reading spree and found out that CP/M was written by Gary
>> Kildall well before MS-DOS was supposedly by Bill Gates!  It's a long
>> history that I obviously don't need to go into here since there is so much
>> about it on the Internet.

> No, but you should learn it.
> LOTS more details are readily available about every portion of this 
> over-simplified shortened history.

  [snip]

> Bill Gates went down the street to SCP, and negotiated a deal 
> to be able to sell licenses to Q-DOS/86-DOS/SB-86 to an unnamed client.

Not Bill Gates, Paul Allen, as detailed in his autobiography _Idea Man_.

Just for the record.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: CDC 6600 - Why so awesome?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Swift Griggs
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 6:46 PM

>On Wed, 22 Jun 2016, Rich Alderson wrote:

>> We have [a DD60] running at LCM, attached to an instance of dtCyber, the
>> 6000/Cyber simulator, via John Zabolitzky's Xilinx-based display adapter.
>> We're in the process of refurbing the one that came with the 6500, which
>> we may attach to the system at some point.

> Is that "Living Computer Museum" ? You are in Seattle, right? I'll stop by 
> for sure if I'm in the area. I'm in Denver.

That's correct.  We're building out the first floor of the building right
now (open during construction), for a grand reopening in early November.
The new exhibit space will take us beyond vintage systems to the important
work being done by their descendants.

A pointer to the web site is in my .sig, of course.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: CDC 6600 - Why so awesome?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Swift Griggs
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 1:58 PM

On Wed, 22 Jun 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:

>> I think Paul's covered that pretty well.  I'll add that the more complex
>> the display, the more flicker was present.

> The descriptions are fascinating. I hope I can see one operating some day. 
> Do you know of any still operational ?

We have one running at LCM, attached to an instance of dtCyber, the 6000/Cyber
simulator, via John Zabolitzky's Xilinx-based display adapter.  We're in the
process of refurbing the one that came with the 6500, which we may attach to
the system at some point.

>> Well, SCOPE had INTERCOM, an interactive facility, as well as 
>> EXPORT/IMPORT which was an RJE facility.  But the system was targeted 
>> primarily at batch jobs.

> Hmm, after reading the responses, I'm guessing most folks just showed up 
> with an armload of punch cards and didn't bother with keying things on the 
> console at the altar of the system.

Not a matter of "didn't bother with", but rather "were never allowed to".
You don't get to fuck with the console of a multimillion dollar machine if
you're not part of the operations or systems programming staff.

And it's rarely an armload.  Most programs fit into a deck of a few dozen
cards or so.  If you can't wrap a rubber band around the deck, you kept it
in the box.  (Oh, yeah, you bought cards in boxes of 2000.  About 16" long,
IIRC.)

>> As an aside, take a look at the UNIVAC 1107/1108 instruction set from 
>> roughly the same period.  It has an instruction to define the byte size 
>> (36 bit words).

> Hmm, interesting. I can't really even wrap my head around the implications.
> If you can't change the register sizes, why would you want to do that?  Was
> it just to shorten certain operations by increasing or decreasing their width?

For the same reason you do it in the PDP-6/PDP-10:  Data often comes in the
form of text characters, which are much smaller than the word size, so it makes
sense to pack them in.

On the 6/10, the common method was 7-bit ASCII packed 5 per word.  With
instructions for operating on byte pointers available, you set your initial
pointer up such that an increment will end up pointing at the first byte in a
word; Macro-10 had a pseudo-op for doing that (or pointing at any other byte in
the word, depending on what you needed to do).  In addition to the byte size
and location within the word, the indexed and/or indirected address of the word
is in the one-word byte pointer.

The most commonly used instructions are ILDB (Increment pointer and LoaD Byte
into AC) and IDPB (Increment pointer and DePosit Byte); there are also LDB and
DPB (good for status-checking operations, for example), IBP (Increment Byte
Pointer), and on the KL-10 and later processors, ADJBP (ADJust Byte Pointer,
which can back up as well as move forward).  If the byte size is such that no
room is left in the current word, the first byte in the next word in memory is
addressed.

The networking code uses a lot of 8- and 16-bit byte pointers, to handle the
fields in IP datagrams.  Other I/O code uses other byte sizes, to pull out or
set the relevant parts of device register values.

A quick example, which substitutes a space for a rubout in a text string
without having to copy it into a second:

txtptr: point 7,string  ; sets up to point to the non-existent byte
; before string

move  10,txtptr ; initialize pointer in loop
top:ildb  11,10 ; increments pointer, copies byte into AC 11
skipn 11; non-null value?
 jrst bottom; no, end of string, exit loop
caie  11,177; is it a rubout character
 jrst top   ; no, get next character in string
movei 11,40 ; change a rubout to a space
dpb   11,10 ; deposit byte into same location it came from
jrst  top   ; and continue
bottom: 

PDP-10 operating systems in general use null-terminated strings.

Hope that helps you with capital wrapping.

Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: where to find DEC ECO's for KB11-A?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Al Kossow
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 7:42 AM

> good a time as any to mention this..

> I bought a step and repeat fiche scanner a couple of months ago
> and am going to start scanning the thousands of sheet backlog I
> have, once I get all the fiche in one place and dedup it. ECO-LOGs
> are definitely in there (have several DEC PDP-xx 'blue boxes')

Hi, Al,

Does the scanner have a setting to do row-major vs. column-major
scanning?  I ask from experience:  When I was putting Tops-10 v6.03A
on our 1070, I had to have a fiche listing of VMSER.MAC scanned to
PDF.  As you know, DEC FS fiche sheets are column-major, but the PDF
came back to me row-major.  I had to print it out on 11x17 to reorder
the pages for typein.

Later, when I had the time, I used Acrobat to reorder the pages in
the PDF, but that was also a major PITA.

Just thinking of you.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: CDC 6600 - Why so awesome?

[Rich Alderson]

From: Swift Griggs
Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2016 2:06 PM

> - It used odd sized (by todays standards) register, instruction, and bus 
>   sizes. 60 bit machine with 15/30 bit instructions. But, didn't it cause 
>   a bunch of alignment issues for you ?

???  Alignment issues?  Care to define this?  Are you thinking of bytes?

The word is the addressable unit of storage.  Compilers (well, the FORTRAN
compiler, to start) and the assembler inserted 15-bit no-ops as necessary
to pad the 60-bit words of a CP program.  PP programs fit five 12-bit
instructions per word.

Character codes are 6- or mixed 6/12-bit, packed into the 60-bit word.

Where would you see alignment issues?

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: Passing of R. Tomlinson

[Rich Alderson]

From: Murray McCullough
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2016 1:17 PM

> Sorry about being late: Raymond Tomlinson, email inventor, sadly passed
> on to the 'cyberworld' in March of this year. In this Age of the
> Internet, we're communicating with his invention and sharing our hobby
> throughoutthe world. Imagine 100 yrs. ago how we would have done this!

Pedantic note:  Tomlinson did not invent e-mail.

What he did invent was a mechanism by means of which electronic mail
programs running on networked computers could communicate with each other.
In particular, he decided to use a character with a low frequency of
occurrence in text as the indicator that an address in the form of a user
identifier of some kind resided on a computer other than the local host.
His choice was, of course, the commercial-at (or commercial-a) character.

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

Myths about Lisp [was RE: strangest systems I've sent email from]

[Rich Alderson]

From: ben
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2016 5:42 PM

> On 5/11/2016 5:54 PM, Toby Thain wrote:

>> On 2016-05-11 7:43 PM, Liam Proven wrote:

>>> If we'd had 4 decades of effort aimed at fast Lisp Machines, I think
>>> we'd have them.

>> Compiled Lisp, even on generic hardware, is fast. Fast enough, in fact,
>> that it obviated Symbolics. (More in Richard P. Gabriel's history of
>> Lucid.) See also: The newly open sourced Chez Scheme.

> But List still sequential processing as far as I can see? How do you 
> speed that up?

This is another of the long-standing myths perpetuated by people who
know nothing about the language.

It has literally been decades since lists were the only data structure
available in Lisp.  If you need non-sequential access to process data,
arrays are the ticket, or hashes.  Choose the best data structure for
to problem at hand.

(Similarly, data types other than atoms have been around since the very
 earliest LISP.  They just weren't sexy, and didn't get a lot of press
 since they weren't novel and difficult to understand.  Math code from
 the MACLISP compiler was better than that generated by the F40 FORTRAN
 compiler.)

>> The myths around garbage collection are also thick, but gc doesn't
>> impede efficiency except under conditions of insufficient headroom (long
>> documented by research old and new).

> Well GC is every Tuesday here. :)

You joke, but in one of the visionary papers on GC from the early 70s, a
tongue-in-cheek scenario was proposed in which GC was done by a portable
system which had sufficient memory would visit large facilities to do
background GC for them on, say, a monthly basis.

    Rich

Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Rich Alderson]

From: Sean Conner
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2016 12:00 PM

> It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:

>> The way LispMs worked, AIUI, is that the machine language wasn't Lisp,
>> it was something far simpler, but designed to map onto Lisp concepts.

> The Lisp machines had tagged memory to help with the garbage collection
> and avoid wasting tons of memory.  Yeah, it also had CPU instructions like
> CAR and CDR (even the IBM 704 had those [4]).

> [4]   It's a joke.  Look it up.

Of course it's a joke.  LISP had CAR and CDR because of the 704, along with
CTR and CPR!  (OK, tags and prefixes got dropped in later implementations on
later hardware.)

    Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/

RE: strangest systems I've sent email from

[Rich Alderson]

From: Liam Proven
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2016 6:39 AM

BTW, an expansion for someone who missed a humorous point very early on:

"FTHI" means "For the humour-impaired", and was followed by numerous
smilicons.

> On 27 April 2016 at 20:15, Swift Griggs <swiftgri...@gmail.com>> wrote:

>> All "you guys" seemed to start out with math or EE background and filling
>> in the CS parts seems to be trivial for you. I look up to your generation,
>> believe it or not.

> I was an undergrad biologist. :-) I've never studied CS.
> But I think you have a point.

I received undergraduate and graduate degrees in historical linguistics; all
my computer science background is due to my own self-directed study--and I do
mean study.  I've read any number of primary papers and books in the field,
since that study made me better at using computers for what I really wanted to
do.  I've implemented compilers, and even my own Lisp interpreter, just for
the fun of it.

I am not one of the Lisp gods.  The closest I came was interviewing for a
systems programming job at the MIT AI Lab (dinner with Pat Winston at O'Hare
one late fall evening when he had a layover).  I went to work at Stanford the
next year.

I studied Lisp from the ground up:  Read the Weisman LISP 1.5 book, read the
LISP 1.5 Primer by McCarthy et al., read the sources to Portable Standard Lisp
and MDL (and the MDL books from MIT), read Abelson and the Common Lisp
book (1st ed.).

At the same time, I read many papers in artificial intelligence of the 1970s
and early 1980s, most interested in natural language processing and knowledge
representation.

I've never done anything for money with either my degrees or my AI studies.
I've supported myself and my wife as a systems programmer on IBM and DEC big
iron, the latter eventually leading directly to working at the museum.

As you might imagine, I'm a good bit older than either of you; I started at
university (since you both want to equate "college" with "trade school"; in
the US, we usually say "go to college" even if the institution grants higher
degrees as well) before Liam was born.  I was married and in grad school by
the time Swift came along.

I'm sorry that Swift took amiss my intended humor, but it's sparked an
interesting long thread.

Rich



Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/