Re: [Simh] Problem booting RSX11M on pdp11 (halt at loc 0)

[khandy21yo]

Since you're using a shared device, could virtualbox be doing a dos2unix thing 
to yo which side of the share did you write you're image to? Does it look the 
same from both sides?


from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Mark Pizzolato  
Date: 3/30/18  8:35 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Phil Fisher 
, mikestra...@gmail.com Cc: "Bob Supnik (simh)" 
 Subject: Re: [Simh] Problem booting RSX11M on pdp11 
(halt at loc 0) 
On Friday, March 30, 2018 at 4:35 AM, Phil Fisher wrote:
> the point on another Linux is valid -- as I suspect VBox itself is not to 
> blame
> since I had similar results with VMware Workstation (although I have not
> attempted to find a way to access "real" store on there I think it would work 
> if
> I could do so).
> 
> Based on other responses and comments from the mailing list that others
> have run other SimH simulators under virtualisation (but maybe more
> commercial ones) with no issues I suspect it may be something on my
> hardware setup on the HP laptop (relating to virtualisation) or the Win 10
> itself.
> 
> I am not yet good with SimH debugging (it took me a while to get to provide
> the help it did and I am still not convinced I did it correctly) so any
> suggestions welcome on that front.  

You found your way there reasonably well.  Building with DEBUG=1 is only 
necessary if you're planning on running the simulator under a debugger and
plan to set breakpoints, etc directly in the simulator code.  The simh 
provided debug output is always there without regard to having built 
things with DEBUG=1.

Meanwhile, you've isolated things well to what seems to be where the
Disk image file is located.  To help yourself you should use host system
tools to assure that the files are indeed EXACTLY the same.

I pulled down a CentOS 7 ISO image and installed that in a newly
created VirtualBox VM on my Windows 10 Laptop.  I pulled the latest
code from github.com/simh/simh master branch and built it and tested.
This is what happened to me:

[mark@localhost simh]$ make pdp11
*** Installing git hooks in local repository ***
lib paths are: /lib64/ /usr/lib64/dyninst/ /usr/lib64/iscsi/ /usr/lib64/mysql/
include paths are: /usr/include
using libm: /lib64/libm.so
using librt: /lib64/librt.so
using libpthread: /lib64/libpthread.so /usr/include/pthread.h
using regex: /usr/include/regex.h
using libdl: /lib64/libdl.so /usr/include/dlfcn.h
using mman: /usr/include/sys/mman.h
*** Info ***
*** Info *** The simulator you are building could provide more
*** Info *** functionality if video support were available on your system.
*** Info *** Install the development components of libSDL packaged by your
*** Info *** operating system distribution and rebuild your simulator to
*** Info *** enable this extra functionality.
*** Info ***
using libpcap: /usr/include/pcap.h
*** Info ***
*** Info *** pdp11 Simulator are being built with
*** Info *** minimal libpcap networking support
*** Info ***
*** Info ***
*** Info *** Simulators on your Linux platform can also be built with
*** Info *** extended LAN Ethernet networking support by using VDE Ethernet.
*** Info ***
*** Info *** To build simulator(s) with extended networking support you
*** Info *** should read 0readme_ethernet.txt and follow the instructions
*** Info *** regarding the needed libvdeplug components for your Linux
*** Info *** platform
*** Info ***
***
*** pdp11 Simulator being built with:
*** - compiler optimizations and no debugging support. GCC Version: 4.8.5.
*** - dynamic networking support using Linux provided libpcap components.
*** - Local LAN packet transports: PCAP TAP NAT(SLiRP)
***
*** git commit id is b0ff29781b2e6f526f6f36602590fcd91adc0c95.
*** git commit time is 2018-03-29T21:12:44-0700.
***
gcc -std=gnu99 -U__STRICT_ANSI__  -O2 -finline-functions -fgcse-after-reload 
-fpredictive-commoning -fipa-cp-clone -fno-unsafe-loop-optimizations 
-fno-strict-overflow -Wno-unused-result 
-DSIM_GIT_COMMIT_ID=b0ff29781b2e6f526f6f36602590fcd91adc0c95 
-DSIM_GIT_COMMIT_TIME=2018-03-29T21:12:44-0700 
-DSIM_GIT_COMMIT_TIME=2018-03-29T21:12:44-0700  -DSIM_COMPILER="GCC Version: 
4.8.5" -I . -D_GNU_SOURCE -DUSE_READER_THREAD -DSIM_ASYNCH_IO  -DHAVE_REGEX_H 
-DHAVE_DLOPEN=so -DHAVE_UTIME -DHAVE_GLOB -DHAVE_SHM_OPEN  sim_BuildROMs.c -o 
BIN/BuildROMs
BIN/BuildROMs
rm -f BIN/BuildROMs
gcc -std=gnu99 -U__STRICT_ANSI__  -O2 -finline-functions -fgcse-after-reload 
-fpredictive-commoning -fipa-cp-clone -fno-unsafe-loop-optimizations 
-fno-strict-overflow -Wno-unused-result 
-DSIM_GIT_COMMIT_ID=b0ff29781b2e6f526f6f36602590fcd91adc0c95 
-DSIM_GIT_COMMIT_TIME=2018-03-29T21:12:44-0700 
-DSIM_GIT_COMMIT_TIME=2018-03-29T21:12:44-0700  -DSIM_COMPILER="GCC Version: 
4.8.5" -I . -D_GNU_SOURCE -DUSE_READER_THREAD -DSIM_ASYNCH_IO  -DHAVE_REGEX_H 
-DHAVE_DLOPEN=so -DHAVE_UTIME -DHAVE_GLOB -DHAVE_SHM_OPEN  PDP11/pdp11_fp.c 
PDP11/pdp11_cpu.c PDP11/pdp11_dz.c PDP11/pdp11_cis.c 

Re: [Simh] Install VAX/VMS 4.4 on a simulated VAX-11/780

[khandy21yo]

If this is just for a one shot deal, it might be a lot easier to talk someone 
else into letting you into their VAX instead of dealing with all of this. After 
installing VMS, which is harder for the older versions, you will still need to 
install pascal. If this is for a longer term project, then having your own is 
better.


rom my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Henk van de Kamer  
Date: 3/23/18  8:45 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: [Simh] 
Install VAX/VMS 4.4 on a simulated VAX-11/780 
Hi,

I'm new to this list, so forgive me if I do things wrong...

For an article about the history of prompts I want to make screendumps 
of all systems I worked on. In 1986 (may be 1987) I learned Pascal on 
the VAX-11/785 (I think) on the university.

So two days ago I started a journey to install VAX/VMS 4.4 -- because 
that is the most probable version used -- on a VAX-11/780 using the Simh 
emulator under Debian Stretch. That was the first problem because the 
man page of the vax780 command said that ka655.bin was not included. I 
found the ka655x.bin in the Simh git. Later I discovered that the man 
page is probably wrong and I must use vmb.exe instead.

After searching I found the bb-bt05c-be tape [1] which contains DEC 
VAX/VMS V4.4 BIN 16MT9 (C)1986 [2]. After a lot of trial, problems and 
searching I finally discovered that I need the Standalone Backup and a 
procedure for v3.0 [3]. Another searched and I got three tapes [4]:

 BE-CT97A-BE - VAX/VMS V4.0 STANDALONE BACKUP 1 OF 3
 BE-CT98A-BE - VAX/VMS V4.0 STANDALONE BACKUP 2 OF 3
 BE-CT99A-BE - VAX/VMS V4.0 STANDALONE BACKUP 3 OF 3

I adapted the given ini to the following -- the complete ini with the 
same adaptions don't give any difference:

load vmb.exe
set rp0 rp06
set rp1 rp06
attach rp0 stb40.rp6
set console log=logs/vms44.log

Then the procedure:

hvdkamer@obelix:~/vax$ vax780 vax780.ini

VAX780 simulator V3.8-1
Overwrite last track? [N]
Logging to file "logs/vms44.log"
sim> boot rp1
Loading boot code from vmb.exe

[ctrl-E]
Simulation stopped, PC: 0E8D (BITL #1000,4(R7))
sim> attach ts bb-bt05c-be.tap
sim> cont
[Enter]


And there it hangs. I downloaded the v3.0 tape used in the example, but 
that results in the same.

The above looks the most promising of all examples I tried. Most used 
options which didn't work or crashed the emulator. Can someone point me 
in the right direction to install the operating system. Thanks for any help.



[1] ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/cm/dec/vax/sw/magtapes/
[2] 
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/cm/dec/vax/sw/magtapes/labels.txt
[3] 
http://simh.trailing-edge.narkive.com/P8L1m0CF/problem-booting-vms-1-5#post7
[4] http://iamvirtual.ca/VAX11/VAX-11-software.html

-- 

Henk van de Kamer
http://www.vandekamer.com/
http://www.hetlab.tk/
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Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[khandy21yo]

There is a project on gitnub called BLISS-M. Is it comparable with any version 
of bliss discussed here? 
Never had BLISS on anything until long after it would have been useful. So how 
does BLISS compare to C as a systems programming language? Is it worth learning 
at this late date?


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Phil Budne  Date: 
1/28/18  1:59 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com, p...@ultimate.com, 
fsword...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: 
PDP11 on Simh for public access) 
I wrote:
> I found BLISS-11 sources and binaries in decus catalog item 10-325:
> directory [43,50325] in (The DECUS catalog numbers are decimal

catalog number is 10-213 (decimal)
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Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 168, Issue 38

[khandy21yo]

The MicroVAX 3100 had a bug in the boot Rom that limited it to a 1.06? Disk. I 
don't know if it also occurred on other systems.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Larry Baker  Date: 
1/25/18  7:17 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: heal...@avanthar.com Cc: SIMH 
 Subject: Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 168, Issue 38 
We ran into this on a real VAX when we added a 20GB SCSI disk, as I recall.  
Either VAX/VMS or the hardware (I think it was VAX/VMS) only looks at the 
low-order 24 bits of the disk size.  So, our 20GB disk was viewed as a 3+GB 
drive on the VAX.  Alpha/VMS has no problem handling larger drives.  I think 
I've used 100GB drives on an Alpha.  I know I have a 72GB and a 50GB drive on 
our Alpha now.

Larry Baker
US Geological Survey
650-329-5608
ba...@usgs.gov






On 25 Jan 2018, at 6:04:06 PM, simh-requ...@trailing-edge.com wrote:
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2018 18:01:41 -0800
From: Zane Healy 
To: Dennis Boone 
Cc: simh 
Subject: Re: [Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8


On Jan 25, 2018, at 2:22 PM, Dennis Boone  wrote:

If you're venturing into unix technology, it's possible to mount nfs
shares on the VMS machines.  Then you can use BACKUP to write save sets
onto the nfs share.  There seems to be some care needed with ADF
metadata.  Multinet seems to write this to a hidden file or
subdirectory; not sure what UCX/TCPIP do.

I actually looked into this option around 2008 (for the same Alpha).  If I 
remember correctly I ran into a problem on the VMS side of the file size limit 
(I have the same disk size now I had in 2008).  This can work, but you have to 
break larger disks up into chunks.  I’m hoping to avoid that, with the solution 
I’m looking at.

Zane

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Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[khandy21yo]

Rsts basic+ has two modes. Extend and noextend,
Noextend is the original mode, where 'line continues with a linseed and ends 
with a return. The & character works as a shortcut for print. Statements were 
separated with a colon :
Extend mode was changed things around. It was a later addition. 'line continues 
used the &, statement separator was the /, and shortcuts were gone.
Put a line at the front of the code like '1 noextend and they may work fine as 
is.



Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Clem Cole  Date: 1/25/18 
 6:15 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: Johnny Billquist  Cc: Simh 
 Subject: Re: [Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was 
Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access) 


On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 7:23 PM, Johnny Billquist  wrote:
 I thought Dave Ahl didn't come from that environment. 
I'm pretty sure Ahl was in Education System's group, which I thought at one 
point was in MRO (Marlboro).    Small-systems was in the Mill.  MRO was 36-bit 
land.   So he would have had access to the 10s, but I note you're right there 
had been many 8s in the Education stream.
That said, few HSs could even afford them.  Folks in HS's  (like my father who 
was teaching Math in a HS outside of Philadelphia during that time period) were 
most likely running on remote timesharing systems via dial-up lines - with 
GE(Honywell)/Mark-IV being the giant in that business (my own entry in the 
computers with him in '67 was on the Mark-II and Mark-III).   DEC's customers 
that were trying to get into that business were mostly supported by PDP-10s, 
not small systems.
RSTS Basic is a late entry, the language support for it, originally came from 
the compiler group which again was originally PDP-10 based (also remember the 
PDP-11 BLISS compiler needed a 10 to run it).
I can not look in my own archives from the time, my only PDP-10 documentation I 
have left from the early 70s, is the white monitor 'phone book.'  I do have 
later (circa '78) PDP-10/20 docs but that would have be after the book 
described was published.
Clem

ᐧ
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Re: [Simh] PDP11 on Simh for public access

[khandy21yo]

Now he needs to simulate the noise that the actual systems created. A couple of 
vacuum  cleaners would do nicely. Maybe three?
Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Paul Koning  
Date: 1/23/18  7:46 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Johnny Billquist  Cc: 
simh@trailing-edge.com, Mark Pizzolato  Subject: Re: [Simh] 
PDP11 on Simh for public access 


> On Jan 23, 2018, at 5:55 AM, Johnny Billquist  wrote:
> 
> Good that it works. Do you know what the problem was in detail? Also - with 
> regard to cpu load. Have you told simh to idle when the simulation does?
> 
> And for Paul. Is rsts using the wait instruction to idle?

Yes, RSTS idles just fine.  It uses WAIT for that (at least as far back as V4).

paul


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Re: [Simh] Custom ROMs on PDP-11 sim

[khandy21yo]

Can't you just load them into ram and run them from there?Rom is just non 
writable memory.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Aaron Jackson  
Date: 12/15/17  10:37 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Mark Pizzolato  
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Custom ROMs on PDP-11 sim 
Hi Mark,

It probably does not matter anymore unfortunately. I have a PDP-11 from
a Unimation PUMA robot, which has a 16x EPROM board in it but no power
supply. I was hoping to try running what was on them inside a
simulator. I started dumping them and realised that they have all been
erased before it was sent to me.

Of course I could have tried installing the card in my PDP-11/73 but I
thought there might have been an easier way with the simulator.

Never mind, thanks anyway.

Aaron.





Mark Pizzolato writes:

> Hi Aaron,
>
> On Friday, December 15, 2017 at 7:18 AM, Aaron Jackson wrote:
>> I am wondering if it is possible to use attach ROM dumps in the PDP-11 simh?
>> I haven't found anything about it in the documentation. If not, I suppose it
>> wouldn't be too hard to modify the bootrom header.
>
> The PDP11 simulator (which simulates MANY different PDP11 models) doesn't
> actually use any ROMs and doesn't currently support simulation of any cards
> which user supplied ROMS might have been installed in.
>
> What problem are you trying to solve???
>
> - Mark


--
Aaron Jackson
PhD Student, Computer Vision Laboratory, Uni of Nottingham
http://aaronsplace.co.uk
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Re: [Simh] MicroSD Card for SimH on Raspberry Pi 3

[khandy21yo]

If you're just starting off with a pi, it might be easiest to buy a kit, which 
includes all the necessary parts to get started, including power supply, case, 
heat sinks, HDMI cable, and a SIM card preloaded with an os. Available on 
Amazon, and many others. 
Get a 32 or larger card if you want to set up a lot of drives. And the pi3 is 
powerful enough for a lot of other games and stuff. Full Linux environment 
available, including compi,are, web browsers,, ...Fun toy.
If you don't have hdmi display available, get a HDMI to  vga converter. Also a 
usb keyboard and mouse.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Shaun McCloud 
 Date: 12/6/17  5:33 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: [Simh] MicroSD Card for SimH on Raspberry Pi 3 
Hello,
I have just gotten into SimH and am planning on getting a Raspberry Pi 3 for my 
SimH usage, just to not use up a lot of space on my laptop.  What is a good 
MicroSD card for the Pi 3 and SimH?  Or does it not really matter as long as it 
works fine in the Pi 3 on its own and has capacity for what I want to do?
Shaun McCloud, MCDST

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Re: [Simh] Problem using a real VT terminal with simh

[khandy21yo]

Have you configured the centos serial port to anything? It may be the problem.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Peter Allan  
Date: 12/5/17  10:56 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: [Simh] 
Problem using a real VT terminal with simh 
I am trying to get a real VT420 terminal working with a simulated micro VAX 
3900. However, I am having problems getting text displayed on the screen of the 
VT420.
The host for simh is a standard PC running CentOS 6.9.
I am connecting the VT420 to the PC using the 25-pin RS232 connector at the 
back of the VT420, going via a 25-pin to 9-pin adaptor, to the 9-pin RS232 
connector on the PC. I am convinced that the physical connection is correct 
since I can start an agetty process at boot time and log into CentOS from the 
VT420. Everything works and displays as I would expect. 
For what follows, I have removed the starting of the agetty process so that 
nothing is controlling the /dev/ttyS0 device before I start simh.
The simulated microVAX 3900 is running VMS 7.3 from an RA92 disk. This 
configuration has been running successfully for a long time and I am only now 
trying to add the connection of a physical terminal.
In the vax.ini file, I have added the lines
SET DZ LINES=4ATTACH DZ LINE=0,CONNECT=SER0
Once the microVAX has booted, if I hit Enter on the VT420, then I can see that 
a login process starts on the simulated microVAX, but all I see on the screen 
of the VT420 is a few garbage characters. Despite that, when I type a username 
and a password, I do get logged into the simulated microVAX. Any commands that 
I type on the keyboard of the VT420 appears on the screen of the VT420 (except 
the password, of course), but anything that the microVAX is sending to the 
VT420 appears as garbage. There are recognisable characters, but if I TYPE a 
file, even a small one, what appears seems to be every 7th character from the 
file starting with the first character. The output of commands such as DIR 
appear to have the same problem.
Furthermore, when I log into the microVAX, the VT420 goes through a reset, as 
though I had turned it off and on. I think this is because the login sequence 
does a SET TERMINAL/INQUIRE since if I type that command, exactly the same 
thing happens. This seems particularly odd since I have used that command many 
times with a real computer (although admittedly not with this particular 
terminal) and I have never seen this happen before.
The VT420's RS232 port is set to a speed of 9600, with 8 bits and no parity and 
the TTA0: device on the microVAX also gets set to this combination.
Hopefully I am just doing something wrong, but I can't see what that might be. 
Can anyone help with this please?
Peter Allan

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Re: [Simh] Problem using a real VT terminal with simh

[khandy21yo]

I'd suspect  a problem with the 8th bit being handled funny , maybe mark parity 
Are the characters in the right pattern to be vms prompts, and are they always 
the same? 
If you can log  into linux fine on that terminal, telnet from there Into the 
emulator and see what happens. You can telnet in via cup or set the dh lines to 
be telnet ports.



Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Peter Allan  
Date: 12/5/17  1:38 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: Mark Pizzolato , 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Problem using a real VT terminal 
with simh 
Thanks to everyone for their quick responses.
To my surprise, Xon/Xoff was turned off on the VAX, specifically, SHOW TERM 
TTA0 showed No HostSync. However SET TERM/PERM/HOSTSYNC TTA0 made no difference.
I have tried setting the line speed to 2400, but that only slows down the 
output. It still contains the same characters, to the extent that I can tell. 
I will continue to experiment and I will try using a different computer so that 
the serial port hardware is (presumably) different. If I can't solve it, I will 
indeed create an issue on github as Mark suggests.
Cheers
Peter Allan

On 5 December 2017 at 19:30, Mark Pizzolato  wrote:
On Tuesday, December 5, 2017 at 10:08 AM, Paul Koning wrote:

> Do you have flow control (Xon/Xoff) enabled both on the terminal and on the

> VAX?

>

> You might try a slower speed to see if that makes a difference.  It shouldn't,

> but it might give more information.

>

> Is autobaud enabled on the line?  You might turn that off and set the speed

> and related parameters explicitly.



These are all great suggestions.  Autobaud should definitely be turned off on

the VMS side, but I don't think that is the problem since he's able to login

and the commands he types produce output, which merely is garbled.



A slower speed, which is explicitly stated on the ATTACH command might

help.

     sim> ATTACH DZ LINE=0,CONNECT=SER0;2400-8N1



I think that what you're seeing is output from the simulator overrunning

the host OS provided interface to the serial port.  This came up a while back.

The simulator serial port interface delivers data to the host OS driver one

character at a time as it is emitted by the simulator.  The simulator is

notified of I/O completion when the host OS said the IO was complete.

On some operating systems, this completion notification merely indicated

that the data had made it to a kernel buffer and not actually out through

the hardware.  This early completion indication then was passed back

through the simulator and more data was then emitted.  Ultimately it seemed

that there was not a reliable way to know that the data has actually, not only

made it to the hardware, but actually been transmitted.  Some relatively

common serial ports have an output buffer in the hardware that will take

a number of characters to be transmitted as quickly as the host puts them

into the hardware, and then deliver it outbound after the fact.  In any case

due to the problem of not getting a precise indication from the OS driver of

when the data actually made it out the serial port, an alternative approach

was taken.  This approach attempts to time the delivery of character I/O

data to the OS driver by explicitly scheduling the I/O completion time based

on the port specified speed.  This approach presumes that the OS actually

starts to send some of the data to the serial port when it is presented and

doesn't hold off until some buffer full condition is achieved.



If the above ATTACH suggestion doesn't work for you, please create an issue

at https://github.com/simh/simh/issues and we can try to dig into this further.



> > On Dec 5, 2017, at 12:56 PM, Peter Allan  wrote:

> >

> > I am trying to get a real VT420 terminal working with a simulated micro VAX

> 3900. However, I am having problems getting text displayed on the screen of

> the VT420.

> > ...

> > Once the microVAX has booted, if I hit Enter on the VT420, then I can see

> that a login process starts on the simulated microVAX, but all I see on the

> screen of the VT420 is a few garbage characters. Despite that, when I type a

> username and a password, I do get logged into the simulated microVAX. Any

> commands that I type on the keyboard of the VT420 appears on the screen of

> the VT420 (except the password, of course), but anything that the microVAX is

> sending to the VT420 appears as garbage. There are recognisable characters,

> but if I TYPE a file, even a small one, what appears seems to be every 7th

> character from the file starting with the first character. The output of

> commands such as DIR appear to have the same problem. ...

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Re: [Simh] C9.io

[khandy21yo]

Do the free sites allow for constantly executing programs 24/7?
Another option into avoid network hacks is to go old school, and p.ug it into a 
dedicated phone line using a modem, if anyone has working modems any more.
Or get a second internet connection for this project,
Isn't this sort of thing usually done by placing the device in question outside 
of your firewall/net box?
 Original message From: Joseph Oprysko  
Date: 12/1/17  5:22 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: Dan Gahlinger  
Cc: simh  Subject: Re: [Simh] C9.io 
I’ve only done network security for the last 12 years. So I’m not talking about 
the script kiddies using programs they’ve downloaded off the darker areas of 
the web. If a hacker really wants to get into your network, they will. Unless 
of course if you unplug it from the internet. 
But even regardless of the security issues, I just don’t want the traffic on my 
home network.  Which is why I’m trying to find somewhere to host it for free, 
so the simh is accessible from the internet. 
Since even if it’s very busy (which it likely wouldn’t be) the amount of data 
transferred would most likely be within the free tiers of some of the various 
VM hosting companies. 

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 7:09 PM Dan Gahlinger  wrote:






yes because hackers can do anything.
they can feed you a fake webpage and access your whole network.



there's no such thing as perfect security.
if that what you want you better stay offline.



any reasonable firewall can protect your system.



setup properly even if they break out of simh they are locked in a chroot jail.
and firewall on the device prevents them from getting anywhere.
with chroot you can take away their access to any standard utilities like 
telnet or ssh or anything too.



this is dirt simple and millions of people do it every day.



by again if you're that worried you better disconnect now.



uh oh look out 127.0.0.1 is attacking you...



Dan






 Original message 
From: Joseph Oprysko  
Date: 2017-12-01 5:54 PM (GMT-05:00) 
To: Dan Gahlinger  
Cc: Ray Jewhurst , simh  
Subject: Re: [Simh] C9.io 





I had the HP2100? Simulated on a Beaglebone Black for the Vintage Computer 
Festival a few years ago. I had an TI Silent 700 teletype connected to it. In a 
way it’s kind of a shame that a $35 (or $5 for a RPi Zero) is more powerful 
than the mainframes
 of old. Actually I have a couple of the Pi Zero W’s around somewhere. 
Computers used to be equipment to diagnose and repair down to the component and 
electrical trace level.  Now it’s literally throw away technology. 



But even with an RPi running simh, it still needs to be on my home network, 
which is one of the things I’d like to avoid for the “Production Server” for 
lack of a better term. 



As for not opening it up, I’m sure there’ll be someone who can figure out how 
crash out of simh and keep/get a shell running, and now they’re sitting on a 
machine inside my network with full access to my network.  And going through 
setting up
 a separate vlan or even having it go through a second router so it’s on it’s 
on it’s own network is more work than I’d rather do. 



On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 5:07 PM Dan Gahlinger  wrote:




a pi would do it.
and it's not opening it up
you open to just one port to just that pi
for just the pps



electric cost of a pi is peanuts.



cloud would cost you orders of magnitude more.



hell I run my own servers domain cloud etc










Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.









 Original message 
From: Joseph Oprysko 

Date: 2017-12-01 2:37 PM (GMT-05:00) 
To: Dan Gahlinger 

Cc: Ray Jewhurst , simh 

Subject: Re: [Simh] C9.io 





Dan, it is easy peasy, but not quite free, as if you want 24/7 access to the 
box, you have to keep the system running 24-7, so electricity costs. Plus, I’m 
planning on having others log in as well, thus I don’t want to open up my 
network like
 that. That’s why I’m looking for a free hosted/Cloud solution. That way 
someone else can deal with the rest of the network security. I do enough of 
that for work anyway, don’t want to have to monitor my home network as 
thoroughly. 



On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 1:12 PM Dan Gahlinger  wrote:








A Linux box running simh bridged with nat
Easy peasy and free




Get 
Outlook for iOS



From: Simh 
 on behalf of Joseph Oprysko 

Sent: Friday, December 1, 2017 1:09:37 PM

To: Ray Jewhurst

Cc: simh

Subject: Re: [Simh] C9.io
 





Well, running from inside a house and making accessible from the outside is 
easy. But most ot my computers at home generally don’t run 24/7. 



Mainly 

Re: [Simh] Attach tar to tape device and access it from v7 in simh

[khandy21yo]

Does V7 require a special version, or can you just download less from gnu.org?


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Mark Abene  Date: 
11/7/17  6:46 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: Will Senn  Cc: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Attach tar to tape device and access 
it from v7 in simh 
I personally don't recall there ever being a less for v7. more, ex, vi, and csh 
were on a tape image of UCB tools, if you can find that.
-Mark

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 2:02 PM, Will Senn  wrote:

  

  
  
On 11/7/17 2:45 PM, Clem Cole wrote:



  





  On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 3:37 PM, Clem
Cole 
wrote:


  
You
  need to convert the foo.tar file to a foo.tap before
  simh's mag tape reader will understand it.
  





  ​1.) ​
  gunzip 1bsd.tar.gz

  
2
​.) 
enblock <1bsd.tar >
  ​1bsd
  .tap
​
 

  ​3.) ​in simh:    att mt0
1bsd.tap
  ​4.) in unix:  ​tar vxfb
/dev/rmt0 ...



  
  

  

Thanks, Clem. Now I'm getting somewhere!



I converted to a tap file (lo and behold, I wrote a perl script that
did this for the silly thing 2 years ago) and ran it. Then attached
the tap to simh and in v7:



# tar xvfb /dev/rmt0

Invalid blocksize. (Max 20)



hmm... that doesn't sound good, let's try it another way:



# tar xv0

tar: ashell/ - cannot create

x ashell/cont.a, 114488 bytes, 224 tape blocks

x ashell/READ_ME, 825 bytes, 2 tape blocks

  # ls -ld ashell

  drwxrwxr-x 2 root   64 Dec 31 22:18 ashell

  # ls ashell

  READ_ME

  cont.a

  # find . -name "more*" -a -print

  # 

...



It's coming back to me now, but oh so slowly, why is it complaining
about cannot create all the while creating the folder? Also, darn! I
was hoping more would be in there somewhere. Anybody know where the
more or less pager source code might be for v7?



Thanks,



Will







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Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 166, Issue 12

[khandy21yo]

Quick test. Copy the tape into disk files using both drives, then compare the 
two files. If they come out the same, then it's something in backup. If they're 
different, you can look and see what bits are changed. If copy errors out on 
the team, then that's probably simpler to debug than backup.
Btw. Does anyone have a source for ds10l cup fans? I need to replace a very 
noisy onr.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Johnny Billquist  
Date: 11/5/17  5:19 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: Paul Koning  
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 166, Issue 12 
On 2017-11-06 00:39, Paul Koning wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Nov 5, 2017, at 5:48 PM, Johnny Billquist  wrote:
>>
>> Ah.
>>
>> That sound like a simh problem. The tape file itself have one of a few 
>> different formats, none of them even keep any CRC (at least none of the ones 
>> I can think of right now).
>> The backing file storage just have the tape records. And obviously, since 
>> the same backing file storage is used on both emulated tape drives, there is 
>> obviously nothing wrong with the file.
>>
>> Any CRC indication is purely made up in simh. And that is where you get the 
>> error indication. So I guess someone needs to dig into the emulation of the 
>> Massbus tape drives.
> 
> Another possibility: VMS BACKUP has its own CRC in its data blocks, entirely 
> separate from the tape drive hardware check codes.  If BACKUP reports CRC 
> errors, it's most likely talking about those.  BACKUP also writes redundant 
> blocks, so if only 1 out of N blocks is bad, the bad block can be 
> reconstructed.  Presumably, CRC errors reported by BACKUP are caused by flaws 
> in the original material that was transcribed into SIMH tape images.

...in which case it should show up both using the TS11 and TE15. But it 
only shows up in the TE16, which suggests that there is nothing wrong 
with the contents of the actual tape image file.

Correct me if I'm thinking wrong somewhere here.

Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist  || "I'm on a bus
   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive! ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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Re: [Simh] 5 Questions (3 Questions Sire) About RSTS/E and Command Line.

[khandy21yo]

If all else rails, you can always have them run simh under Linux.
Assuming they have their own Linux boxes, or vm ...
Many versions of Linux have an old version of simh for easy install (apt-get 
install simh) for Debian and Ubuntu, for example. You would only need to hand 
out a pre-built image and startup file. Os/8?
Dosbox is also available for a msdos she'll
Linux has a boatload of shells to play with. Anyone written dcl for linux?



Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Brett Bump  Date: 
10/6/17  1:29 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: HECnet  Cc: SIMH 
 Subject: [Simh] 5 Questions (3 Questions Sire) About 
RSTS/E and Command Line. 

This is mostly for Tim and Paul, but I figured to cross-post in case any
one might have seen this before (before I lob thy Holy Hand Grenade).

1.  In cleaning up some of my old paperwork, I stumbled across a fanfold
.   paper copy of "RSTS/E System Programmer's Notebook" page 3 (no 1-2)
.   followed by Chapters 1-5 and Appendix A, B pages 1-5.  The bottom of
.   the Preface reads:
.
.   "What follows is a sermon, it is not a Gospel."
.
.   A section on the first page of Appendix A has a paragraph that says:
.
.   CAUTION
.   The PPEK sequences described in this (sic. I presume PEEK)
.   document are not a part of the supported
.   functionality of RSTS/E V6C as described
.   in the RSTS/E Software Product Description.
.
Has anyone seen/read this before, know who wrote it, have a digital copy
that could be distributed out, or am I destined to type it back in so all
can read (it is good material on old yellowed crackly fanfold paper)???

2.  I lost a very good friend (coworker) this week to MI (he was 66).  We
.   were coteaching a class online Tuesday night and Wednesday morning he
.   was gone. :(  I have inherited 2 of his classes and wish to do the
.   best job I can for his students, honor his legacy, and live up to the
.   praise and respect he gave me that he disclosed to his students.
.
One of these classes is on command line and the text is linux specific.
While I love my linux machines, there has always been a natural flow when
typing commands on pretty much any DEC OS (a person kind of has to acquire
a little bit of tourette's tics to be competent with *nix).  Can someone
in the group provide me with a few accounts to connect to so his students
can see something other than linux???  I think I used to have an account
on CHIMPY, but that has been a while back.

3.  Does anyone have a current HECnet map, so that said students could
.   see how HECnet is set up and navigate a couple of different machines?

That's all.  Sorry to be such a hermit.  I rarely poke my head out into
the world, but this time I felt it was for a just cause. :-)

Brett
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Re: [Simh] retargetable assembler

[khandy21yo]

Wikipedia has some rather odd ideas sometimes.
Is there any source for actual Whirlwind Code? It might give more information 
about how people actually used it. 

Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> 
Date: 9/6/17  8:19 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: khandy21yo <khandy2...@gmail.com> Cc: 
Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org>, simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] 
retargetable assembler 

> On Sep 6, 2017, at 9:21 AM, khandy21yo <khandy2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Reading the Wikipedia page about Whirlwind, it mentions that the pdp1 is a 
> direct descendent, so would a pdp1 assembler work? Or a tx0 Assembler? I 
> don't know if these already exist or not.

I wonder why it would say that.  PDP1 and TX0 are both 18-bit machines.  Their 
instruction sets are quite different from each other, and very different also 
from Whirlwind judging by the documents on Bitsavers.  They are all single 
address accumulator machines, but then again so are most other computers of 
that era.

paul

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Re: [Simh] retargetable assembler

[khandy21yo]

Reading the Wikipedia page about Whirlwind, it mentions that the pdp1 is a 
direct descendent, so would a pdp1 assembler work? Or a tx0 Assembler? I don't 
know if these already exist or not.
Is the pdp1 a transistorized Whirlwind as the Wikipedia article suggests? We 
already have an emulator for that.
Anyway, I remember reading about the tx0, and that they were always modifying 
the instruction set in hardware. For this early machine, was there even an 
official assembler Format? And which character sets did it use, probably not 
ascii.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Paul Koning  
Date: 9/6/17  6:19 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Timothe Litt  Cc: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] retargetable assembler 

> On Sep 5, 2017, at 9:18 PM, Timothe Litt  wrote:
> 
> It's a heavy lift & overkill, but GCC (gas) can be made to cross-compile 
> for/from any reasonable machine.  That gives you a complete toolset - but 
> it's a lot of work.

The assembler (gas) is separate from the compiler (gcc and friends).  It's a 
prerequisite for a complete cross-package but you can certainly do a gas for 
some new architecture without bothering with the compiler.

The question is assembler syntax.  If the machine you're after has a standard 
syntax, then gas is unlikely to help since it uses Unix "as" style syntax.  For 
example, while you can assemble PDP11 programs with gas, they don't look like 
familiar Macro-11 programs and if you feed it Macro-11 sources it will complain 
bitterly.

> If it were my project, I'd define some macros in MACRO-11 to create a 
> cross-assembler, as IIRC Whirlwind has 16 bit wordsize.  MACRO-11 has a 
> reasonable set of operators and macro pseudo-ops.  Define the Whirlwind 
> instructions as macros, and you're all set.  People have done this for early 
> micros - it's not quite native and can be a bit awkward - but it works and 
> can be put together with minimal effort.  
> 
> You can output absolute binary from the assembler - or link/task build if you 
> want psects or libraries.  But with the small memory size, MACRO will do.
> 
> If you want 32-bit words, there's always MACRO-32 - pretty much the same 
> macro capabilities.
> 
> For a host, you can use a simh PDP-11 or VAX - whatever you're comfortable 
> with.

Sure, those are good options.  Others mentioned Python to write one from 
scratch.  That is very easy.  I've written an Electrologica assembler in 
Python, which didn't take long, and a more limited assembler is probably just a 
week or two worth of work.

One complication for using Macro-11 is that Whirlwind is one-s complement, so 
negative numbers will be wrong.

paul


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Re: [Simh] Simh and historical Fortran in the news

[khandy21yo]

I know that there were some that did IBM one better. They destroyed the source 
for code that was still shipping.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" 
 Date: 7/13/17  5:46 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Cc: be...@math.utah.edu Subject: [Simh]  Simh and 
historical Fortran in the news 
There is an interesting new journal article published today about the
attempt to recover and reconstruct the first Fortran compiler.  Simh,
and some of the members of the SIMH list, get mention in the article.

@String{j-IEEE-ANN-HIST-COMPUT  = "IEEE Annals of the History of
  Computing"}

@Article{McJones:2017:SOF,
  author =   "Paul McJones",
  title =    "In Search of the Original {Fortran} Compiler",
  journal =  j-IEEE-ANN-HIST-COMPUT,
  volume =   "39",
  number =   "2",
  pages =    "81--88",
  month =    "",
  year = "2017",
  CODEN =    "ICGADZ",
  DOI =  "http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2017.20;,
  ISSN = "0272-1716 (print), 1558-1756 (electronic)",
  ISSN-L =   "0272-1716",
  bibdate =  "Thu Jul 13 14:47:50 MDT 2017",
  bibsource =    "http://computer.org/cga/;
 http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/fortran3.bib;
 http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/bib/ieeecga.bib;,
  URL =  "http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/;,
  acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
  fjournal = "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing",
  journal-URL =  "http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/magazines/cga;,
}

The team's effort was not successful, but they did recover, and make
work, the Fortran II compiler from about 1959.

There were a number of IBM 704 customers who got a printed book
containing a listing of the original compiler, but no copies of that
book, known as ``The Tome'', have yet been found.

The article reports that it was IBM's practice to destroy code for
machines that were no longer manufactured.

---
- Nelson H. F. Beebe    Tel: +1 801 581 5254  -
- University of Utah    FAX: +1 801 581 4148  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233   be...@acm.org  be...@computer.org -
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Re: [Simh] 8" Floppy disk image getting HALT error

[khandy21yo]

If you're interested in WPS8 RX50 format, I have a program to READ rX50 images 
and convert the files to Wordperfect format.  
Http://github.com/khandy21yo/emutools.git.  There's other stuff in there, but 
one of the subdirectories contains the source.
It's been some time since I wrote it, so I don't really remember the details.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Timothe Litt <l...@ieee.org> Date: 
7/11/17  1:09 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] 8" 
Floppy disk image getting HALT error 

VMS mount /over=id /foreign is the quickest way to identify
  files-11 and RT disks.  FILES-11 can be read directly; use
  EXCHANGE for RT-11.  Once you have the disk mounted on VMS, you
  can network it to wherever you like.
If you insist on doing things the hard way, there is low-level
  detail to worry about.


The first  track on DEC 8" floppies is reserved for boot (but not
  used) in the standard RX01/2 formats.  It's not used by any DEC
  OS.  Not even for booting (the DEC boot block is the first LBN
  following the reserved track.)


Both are 77 tracks, 1 sided, 26 sectors/track.  The rx01 is 128
  bytes/sector; the rx02 256.  So an RX01 image will be about 251KB,
  an RX02 about 501KB.


Logical blocks are 512 bytes; meaning that an LBN consists of 4
  or 2 physical sectors.  The physical sectors are interleaved.  If
  you have a physical dump of the disk (and your tools haven't
  outsmarted you), the easiest thing to do is to de-interleave it.
Use the attached utility, which documents the format & will
  interleave/deinterleave a floppy image using the usual interleave
  rules.


19D0(16) is close to 26 * 256 (short by 48 bytes), so I'd guess
  you have an rx02 and are seeing the empty boot track.  (Although
  not guaranteed, the track was usually written with all zeroes).


The 48 bytes may be left over from formatting, or an artifact of
  how you're reading the medium.  Or an indication that your
  recovery dropped something.  Hopefully it checks the CRCs..


The E5 is probably left over from formatting.  I think it was
  part of the sync pattern, and that the formatter wrote 


If you see 8-bit data, it's probably RT11 or Files-11.  These are
  self-identifying - block 1 (the second block) will have a
  filesystem name in starting at byte 760(8).  Will be DECFILE11A
  for ODS1 or DECFILE11B for ODS2, DECRT11A for RT11.  RSTS is also
  possible - I don't remember it's code, probably DECRSTS11A.  Given
  that, data (deinterleaved), humans can easily tell what you have.


RT11 files are contiguous, so recovery is easy.  FILES-11 files
  can be, but probably aren't.  You have to read mapping pointers. 
  There are tools that will do that (one of these daze I do intend
  to release mine.)
But it's much easier to just run EXCHANGE and say "COPY" by filename
:-)



As for WPS-8  - yes, it's packed into 12 bits - but it's also
encoded (I vaguely remember it as a 6-bit code with shift &
formatting - but I'd have to look up the code I wrote to translate
it.)  In any case, it would not look like text to a "modern"
filesystem.

Have fun.



On 11-Jul-17 13:26, Walker Sampson
  wrote:



  Hi everyone,

Many thanks for this feedback. A fair amount to chew on here. I’ve sent a 
request to the donor to share the disk image, if I get a positive I’ll be happy 
to throw up a Dropbox link to it for others to examine.

This may mean a problematic read of the disk itself, but addresses 0 – 
019D0 are all zeroed out, or about bytes 0 – 6655. 

Data begins at byte 6657, and that is the document I mentioned. Last byte of 
the document is 73080 and then just blocks of either zero or E5E5E5E5 till the 
end of the disk. 

To Paul’s point of mounting a RK05 drive – which drive should I be mounting 
here, assuming it is the RX02 disk it seems to be? “AT RX01 ” still 
gets a HALT error. Of course, as you all point out, perhaps this isn’t a 
bootable disk, period. “SH RX01” gives “RX1, 256KB, attached to 
test-decrx01.img, write enabled”

FYI as well, on a modern HFS+ system, the disk image file is coming in at 256 
KB.

Any thoughts on the run of zeroes and E5E5E5E5? 

Thanks again,

Walker

 On 7/11/17, 6:29 AM, "Simh on behalf of Johnny Billquist" 
<simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com on behalf of b...@softjar.se> wrote:

Hi.

On 2017-07-10 22:10, Walker Sampson wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Let me preface this by saying that I’m unfamiliar with the original PDP 
> machines. I work as a digital archivist and have received 8” floppy 
> disks from which I need to recover data.
> 
> I believe I have recovered at leas

Re: [Simh] Idea for a Simh guide

[khandy21yo]

Under Debian and Ubuntu, there is a package called live-build that can create a 
Bootable distribution that runs from DVD. You can include your own software in 
the build, but it takes a long time to build. It includes a lot of standard 
packages that you probably don't need.
Runs entirely off the DVD, but can mount other drives if you desire.
Data files can be changed while running, as it saves the diffs in memory. Any 
data changed that you don't save to external storage gets lost when you shut 
down. Would be one way to distribute turnkey emulators to play with.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Ken Cornetet 
 Date: 5/10/17  12:41 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
Paul Koning , Bob Eager  Cc: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Idea for a Simh guide 
While you could probably get simh running using djgpp and MSDOS, you'd play 
hell trying to get networking. In theory, it would be possible to graft NDIS 
support into simh, but there probably aren't many modern NICs with real mode 
NDIS drivers.

I think you'd be better off building a simh "appliance" around a small linux 
distro. 

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Paul Koning
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2017 2:19 PM
To: Bob Eager 
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Idea for a Simh guide


> On May 10, 2017, at 2:02 PM, Bob Eager  wrote:
> 
> I have a copy of the old Zortech C compiler, with a royalty free DOS 
> extender.

Another option would be DJGPP, which has the advantage of being GCC so SIMH 
should be comfortable with it.  I've used it in the past for Unix-origin 
programs with good success.

paul

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Re: [Simh] DECserver (terminal server) emulation?

[khandy21yo]

Would it be easier to emulate a Dec server, or fix the Linux Decnet code?
If you had LAT working well under Linux, then writing a Dec server would be a 
simple she'll script. Well, maybe not real simple to get all the details right, 
but not too hard.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Pontus Pihlgren  
Date: 4/11/17  4:54 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Jim Carpenter  
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] DECserver (terminal server) 
emulation? 
On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 05:40:55AM -0400, Jim Carpenter wrote:
> 
> Meh. I like the DECserver interface and I only need LAT. And as you said,
> the Linux LAT isn't perfect.
> 

Precisely, people complain about LAT in linux or the poor emulation of 
glass terminals. Getting a DECserver and VT2x0 emulated should raise the 
bar a bit.

/P
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Re: [Simh] VAX 8200

[khandy21yo]

I think  you need 1.2M floppy drives for this. I seem to remember THAT 360k 
drives don't work for reading RX50s.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Paul Koning  
Date: 3/20/17  6:45 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Ethan Dicks  Cc: 
SIMH  Subject: Re: [Simh] VAX 8200 

> On Mar 19, 2017, at 11:33 PM, Ethan Dicks  wrote:
> 
> ...
> I have a number of ways to read RX50s, but nothing is presently set up
> and plugged in for that.  I'll have to dust something off and get it
> going.

PCs can read RX50s if you have a 5.25 inch drive.  DOS, or old enough versions 
of Windows that you can issue BIOS calls work.  On Linux, you can set the 
floppy parameters to 80 tracks, 10 sectors, single sided, and then standard 
utilities like dd will work.  If you have a floppy image you may need to 
process the interleaving to get to an image other file system utilities will 
handle.

My FLX utility (on my Subversion server or in simhtools) can do this.  I have a 
newer version in Python that can be used as a library, and includes an 
interleave/de-interleave tool.

paul

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Re: [Simh] VAX 8200

[khandy21yo]

It's also fun if they install a tape into the tk50 drive with the info pamphlet 
that they always shipped with them. It couldn't retract the tape, and you 
couldn't pull the paper out because of the tight fit. Time to disassemble the 
drive, again.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Ethan Dicks  
Date: 3/17/17  1:21 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: 
[Simh] VAX 8200 
On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 2:35 PM, Gary Lee Phillips  wrote:
> Looking at what images I can find on the web, TU-80 seems correct. The one
> we had was just generally flaky, I guess. It was 1600 bpi, 2400 foot tapes,
> yes.

2400' tapes (1.5mil thickness) were standard but sometime later,
thinner (1.0 mil?) 3600' tapes came out.  I have read tape drive
instructions that say not to use those tapes in this machine.  I
wouldn't be surprised if most DEC tape drives didn't like thinner
tape.

> The MicroVAX we added later came with a TK-50 that never had any problems.

That was not a universal experience.  We had a couple of TK-50 drives
and we found them semi-reliable.  They mostly worked, but we had
occasional spectacular problems.  I had to dismantle the drive more
than once to manually rewind a tape back into the tape case.  We also
lost a few of the pickup barbs.  I have a fresh NOS one - I need to
CAD it up and experiment with various plastic films to see about
lasering some replacements.  Once the tip bends, it needs to be
replaced or it will fail at some random but inconvenient time.

-ethan
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Re: [Simh] VAX 8200

[khandy21yo]

TSV05 or the unibus versions.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Paul Koning  
Date: 3/17/17  11:23 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Wilm Boerhout  
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] VAX 8200 

> On Mar 17, 2017, at 1:17 PM, Wilm Boerhout  wrote:
> 
> Gary Lee Phillips schreef op 17-3-2017 om 16:54:
>> Ethan Dicks > wrote:
>> 
>> >That's earlier than is possible... the model was introduced in Jan,
>> >1986.  Don't know date of first ship.
>> 
>> Well I did say "around 1985 or so." After 30+ years, I'd say that was a 
>> pretty close guess.
>> 
>> The tape drive was not TK50. It was standard reel to reel media, horizontal 
>> like an studio audio tape deck, with a cover that had to be lifted in order 
>> to use it. The disk drive was housed in the same cabinet in a drawer below 
>> the tape unit. The tape drive was "finicky" and seemed to work only with 
>> tapes ordered through DEC. The standard tapes our much larger IBM shop used 
>> never read back correctly when written on it.
> Could it have been a TS11, nicknamed "Tape Stretcher-11" by those (me 
> included) who tried to use it with ever longer, reels of tape and thus ever 
> thinner tape?

Probably not, because the TS11 was a vertical unit.  The top mounted horizontal 
one is the TU80 and friends.  There was also a drive that had the tape loaded 
from the front, horizontally (RK05 fashion), I forgot what that was called.  It 
wasn't all that reliable since it had to do autoload, no manual threading 
possible.

paul


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Re: [Simh] Issues with VH simulation and 4.3BSD-Quasijarus

[khandy21yo]

I used DHV11s on Microvax II when they we're real hardware. Worked fine under 
VMS.  I imagine DH11 wasn't different enough for them to not work on unibus.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Clem Cole  Date: 3/9/17  
12:13 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: Mark Pizzolato  Cc: SIMH 
 Subject: Re: [Simh] Issues with VH simulation and 
4.3BSD-Quasijarus 
Mark... as an FYI if it is of any help..
VH      address=2013E120-2013E15F*, vector=C0-DC*, BR4, lines=64, 4
units
  VH0     attached to 8070, DHU mode, Modem
        0 current connections
  VH1     DHU mode
  VH2     DHU mode
  VH3     DHU mode

device          dhu0    at uba? csr 0160440             vector dhurint

It's been years since, I did this stuff...  
 0160400 is 0xE120  and 0160400 certainly looks right for the Unibus address 
for a DH.   I just can not speak for 0x2013E120 as what is the mapping into the 
Vax address space, but I'll take your word for it that this is correct - that 
is correct.I never saw a real DEC DH on a Vax because of power and space 
issues.That said, we used to mix DEC DH11s and Able DH11's on the PDP-11 all 
the time 
Able DH11's were the most used serial controllers in BSD UNIX land for a long, 
long time, which is why the default BSD configs all probe for them.


So ...If the DHV is supposed to the simh emulation of the combination of a DEC 
DH11 and DM11 pair (the DM11 was the modem control option for the DH), then 
this should "just work" 
That said, I'm not sure if VMS supported real DEC PDP-11 DH11/DM11's in Vaxen.  
I have to believe they would have, but maybe not.  So its possible this has not 
been tested by folks.  I see that a lot of people running simh seem to want to 
use DZ's.
I have not tried the vax simulator a long time - although when I first tried 
it, it was DZ only.   You pointed me at the VH emulation a few years ago, but I 
did not push it very hard.
Thanks,
Clem
On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 1:33 PM, Mark Pizzolato  wrote:
You mean DHV, not DVH, right?  DHV is a Qbus variant of some version of the 
DH11 device.  A VAX 780, not having a Qbus, wouldn’t have such a device in its 
configuration. The addresses you see in the SHOW CONFIG output are where the 
simulator will respond to I/O space references.  Those addresses are determined 
dynamically based on the set of devices which are enabled in the simulator 
configuration.  The variable presence of DZ’s and DH’s in the configuration 
would cause the DH to be found at different addresses. If the operating system 
that is being run (BSD 4.3 in this case) is properly configured to look for a 
DH device at the address which the simulated hardware is operating at, then 
things should work.  Device probes when the kernel starts will be visible with 
this in the simulator configuration: sim> set debug -t STDOUT   
 sim> set VH DEBUG=REG If you’re seeing device probes, then the 
kernel’s configuration matches the simulated hardware.  However, if you see the 
probes, but you DON’T see the kernel recognizing the device, then there may be 
a problem with the simulator.  If that is true, please create an issue at 
https://github.com/simh/simh/issues and I’ll dig into the details. -  
Mark From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Clem Cole
Sent: Thursday, March 9, 2017 10:09 AM
To: Cory Smelosky 
Cc: SIMH 
Subject: Re: [Simh] Issues with VH simulation and 4.3BSD-Quasijarus It looks 
that way..., but I need some help from Bob or Mark on VH history,   That was 
developed at DEC during the period I was off doing Masscomp/Stellar et al.   
During my time earlier time with PDP11 and Vaxen,  you used DEC DZ's or DEC 
DH's or Able DHDM's.   As I understand it, DVH was the mid 1980s' redo of the 
DH to single board but identical in SW (i.e. was similar to the Able DHDM) - 
but I never saw one - so I don't know what the default addresses, iqr's etc 
are.  I am assuming you are defaulting same which means they are what DEC used. 
BSD 4.3 would have been using Able DHDM's so those are the original addresses 
of the DEC DH from the PDP-11. So my question what were the default addresses 
for the DVH and then from a simulator stand point, and if different, what 
happens if you configure them like the original DH11? Clem On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 
at 11:49 PM, Cory Smelosky  wrote:All,

Seems 4.3BSD isn't seeing a DH-11 at all:

4.3 BSD Quasijarus UNIX #0: Sun Mar  7 12:42:05 PST 2004
    root@ucbvax:/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
real mem  = 67108864
SYSPTSIZE limits number of buffers to 18
avail mem = 65271808
using 18 buffers containing 147456 bytes of memory
VAX 11/780, serial# 1234(0), hardware ECO level 7(112)
mcr0 (el) at tr1
mcr1 (el) at tr2
uba0 at tr3
tmscp0 at uba0 csr 174500 vec 774, ipl 15
tms0 at tmscp0 slave 0
tms1 at tmscp0 slave 1
uda0 at uba0 csr 172150 vec 770, ipl 15
uda0: 

Re: [Simh] CI750 tech docs and VAX firmware

[khandy21yo]

Nows your chance to make it happen! 


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Rich Alderson 
 Date: 3/7/17  12:37 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] CI750 tech docs and VAX firmware 
> From: Johnny Billquist 
> Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2017 00:47:08 +0100

> On 2017-03-06 15:03, Timothe Litt wrote:

>> At some point, support for 18-bit disks (576 byte sectors) was dropped.  The
>> HSC50 definitely had it; the HSC90 did not.  I'm unsure about the HSC70.

> Unless I remember totally wrong, only the HSC50 could do 576 byte sectors.
> It was dropped in a pretty early version of CRONIC, before support for any
> other HSC controller existed.

Correct.  Only the HSC50 ever supported 576-byte sectors, and only on RA81 and
smaller drives.  (We really wanted RA82s on our 4-system CI cluster at Stanford
LOTS, but were informed that it would never ever happen.)

    Rich
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Re: [Simh] ts10 and mse (my new emulator)

[khandy21yo]

Are PC speakers capable of being loud enough to simulate the fans on a 11/70? 
If it can't cause damage to your hearing, it's not loud enough.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Lars Brinkhoff  Date: 
2/20/17  12:35 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] 
ts10 and mse (my new emulator) 
Hello,

I have an idea that may be slightly out of the scope of the SIMH
simulator.  However, adding this would make an already great simulator
provide a super fantastic simulated experience.

The idea is to make 3D scans and record sounds from old computers.  No,
I'm not really saying SIMH should include this.  But it would be a great
complement to the historical data we have, which is mostly text
documents and photos.

I can't do this myself.  If someone were to, say, have collection or
even a museum with functional computers, that would be a good starting
point.
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Re: [Simh] 32V on SIMH

[khandy21yo]

In addition to what others have said, there are also programs like Kermit.Some 
terminal emulators have capture capabilities (logging) and some have the 
reverse option (transmit).
Also, does 32v have ftp capabilities? Networking does work in simh.



Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Jason Self  Date: 
1/29/17  4:13 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: [Simh] 32V on 
SIMH 
I've successfully booted 32V in the VAX-11/780 emulator built from git
master on my GNU/Linux system. It's neat. My next task is to be able
to copy files back and forth between the emulator and the host system.
I've been doing some searching online and it's not entirely clear to
me how to accomplish this. I'd thought I'd write in for advice or
pointers. It doesn't matter much to me how it's accomplished: Somehow
communicating with 32V while it's running in the emulator, shutting it
down and accessing the disk image file, or whatever, as long as there
is something.

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Re: [Simh] Looking for a RIM10B paper-tape image --> papertape reader/punch drivers on KS10

[khandy21yo]

Fwiw I did a wps8 to wordperfect converter many years ago. Had a lot of wps8 
disks and they wanted to switch. Had to decode the wps8 format by trial and 
error. Still have the code.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Timothe Litt  Date: 
1/23/17  6:31 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: "R. Voorhorst" , 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Looking for a RIM10B paper-tape 
image --> papertape reader/punch drivers on KS10 

I'm not surprised about your findings on prsser/ppsser.  As I
  wrote, the requirement (and the hardware) disappeared before I
  debugged them.  Yes, they were cloned from PTRSER/PTPSER - besides
  the IO instructions, I believe there were some changes to deal
  with the hardware differences; the binary modes in the hardware in
  particular.


There were changes to system initialization in 703/704, where
  almost everything moved to autcon.  I didn't do that work, and I
  didn't look at PxSSER after they were done.  The hardware was long
  gone.  The original work was c.a. 7.01/7.02.


I can't look at this now (I'm swamped with other issues), but if
  you're still having problems when I do, I'm willing to help.


RX2SER definitely does work with real hardware.  I had hardware
  for quite some time; I used it to create RSX20F floppies.  I don't
  think the code for Files-11 survived - but someday I'll look. 
  Somewhere I have code that reads and writes RT11 file systems; I
  think I implemented everything useful.  I also wrote code that
  reads WPS-8 floppies and does a rough translation into Digital
  Standard Runoff.  It was imperfect, but made porting some
  documentation a lot easier.  



On 22-Jan-17 15:42, R. Voorhorst wrote:



  
  
  
  
Ls,
 
about
the drivers for the KS10 Tops10 paper tape reader and punch
the following:
 
They
appeared to be cloned from PTRSER and PTPSER and some KL10
IO/interrupt instructions replaced with equivalent KS10
instructions;
both
were shipped as unsupported (rightly so, because immature)
but apparently not debugged.
 
PRSSER.MAC
for the paper tape reader lacked necessary preamble code an
some init code, but was relatively easy to make workable; it
looks like it works now (Ascii file import from a file
through the Tops10 PTR succeeds) but the other paper tape
formats needs some testing for which the availability of the
punch driver is desirable.
 
PPSSER.MAC
for the punch lacked the same preamble, but is also not
working due to  operational differences between the KL10
interrupt system and the KS10 one, it behaves incompatible
with the unmodified inherited way of interrupt processing
from PTPSER.MAC
Eventually
it will be made workable after some reconstruction of the
driver code to make up for the differences; up to now it is
(still) plagued with a hung device.
 
On
another note, concerning the other drivers for the Unibus
peripherals on the KS10, the also unsupported floppy disk
driver RX2SER.MAC is confirmed working with the somewhat
functionally limited utility RTFLX from the Grenoble
integration tapes from the mid 80’s; one can exchange RT-11
format data with OpenVMS and other systems. 




 
 
Best
regards,
 
R.
Voorhorst
 

  
From:
Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On
  Behalf Of Timothe Litt

Sent: Sunday, January 22, 2017 21:13

To: simh@trailing-edge.com

Subject: Re: [Simh] Looking for a RIM10B
paper-tape image
  

 
I don't have tape images, but I do have
  information.

  

  There seems to be some confusion here.

  RIM10B is a purely software construct; no
hardware understands it. (And few humans understand the
code, though the data format is simple enough.)
  RIM10 is used by hardware READIN mode this is
the simple IOWD n, addr, data, where the last data word is
XCT'd.
  RIM is a PDP-6 software construct that was
replaced by RIM10B - it's horribly inefficient.



  See 
https://ia801605.us.archive.org/18/items/bitsavers_decpdp10TOguageHandbook021973AsmRefmacro_5710828/02_1973AsmRef_macro_text.pdf
  P. 288  (6.2.2) 

Re: [Simh] Reference performance benchmarks

[khandy21yo]

Is your speed problem limited to disk access, or is it also CPU related? 
Running in a browser might mean that the disk access is going through the 
network, which can slow it down excessively, There are several bottlenecks on a 
system, like slow disks, that don't effect other aspects, like instruction 
speed, it's important to determine exactly where the speed limits exists.CPU 
instruction speed, excessive swapping, disk bandwidth, terminal baud water, . 
.. They can all be a problem, and it can be more than one at a time.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Jacob Goense  Date: 
12/12/16  12:13 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: [Simh] 
Reference performance benchmarks 
I'm running simh in rather tight corners. Mostly VAX/780 and PDP-11/70
with V6 or BSD. Simh runs in a browser, or, I have (too) many of them
on underpowered Asus Eee PC's. Any tips on how I can check if I have
taken things too far? Like minimum values to look for in SHOW CLOCK,
or any tools I can run that can be referenced against same on real kit.

I run into the same question on the I/O end. During the installation
of v6 I can do dd if=/dev/mt0 of=/dev/rk1 bs=2048 count=1000 skip=1025
and it is done in a second on machine that is doing nothing else. With
simh running in a browser on a small busy machine it can take up to an
hour. I have no idea how to gauge how far this is off from real kit.
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Re: [Simh] XServers and Simh (Somewhat OT)

[khandy21yo]

Linux works as a host for xterm  fairly well, depending on the terminal. It can 
also be used as an xterm I also offers  a pc.
To start a window manager on a remote xterm  setenv DISPLAY xterm:0.0   mwm &
Using Linux as an xterm usually requires enabling remote access, as most 
versions of Linux consider remote access as a severe security problem. Usually 
requires editing 4 or so configuration files.

 Original message From: Robert Thomas  Date: 
11/14/16  7:34 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] 
XServers and Simh (Somewhat OT) 
We serve X-Windows from SIMH VAX running VMS 7.3.  There are many flavors of 
X-servers that work.  The most challenging part of using such is getting 
networking to work on SIMH/Vax. Our experience is under Windows: 1) EXCURSION 
(DEC provided with VMS V7 through V7.3 on the Pathworks disk – can be installed 
on its own requiring no special privileges or registry setting).  Provides a 
simple X-server.2) MobaXterm3) Xming4) vcxsrv5) Cygwin-x All of the above are 
free and work with some issues.  EXCURSION is color limited and does not 
properly support plane masks. MobaCterm, Xming, vcxsrv, and Cygwin-X are all 
implementation of XORG’s x-server.  They do not fully support PC keyboards 
emulating LK405 keyboards, i.e. VT400 emulation.  The numeric keypad and 
functions keys are not fully mapped.  Additionally not all of the 
DECwindows/Motif fonts are available.  These are identical to most of the LINUX 
X-Servers. All of the above support local window managers with various modes of 
operation (All in one windows, multiple windows, etc.) as well as a remote 
window manager, e.g. DECwindows/Motif. It is easy to start up a DECterm or the 
DECWindows/Motif CDE.  The steps are to: 1) Start the X-server on your 
workstation/PC allowing connections from the desired clients.2) Log into the 
VMS system using either the mechanism within the X-server environment or 
putty.3) Create a display to the X-server:   $ set 
display/create/trans=tcpip/perm/node=4) To start the CDE 
(DECwindows/Motif window manager):   $ @cde$path:xsession    To 
start a DECterm:   $ create/term/detach We are evaluating EXCEED as 
an x-server.  So far it has full functionality turning a PC into a full 
function X-server, i.e. like having a Vaxstation or Alphastation on your PC.  
Its only drawback so far is its cost being over $500 per seat. BTW:  All of the 
above work on Windows even in Windows virtual machines. Sincerely,Robert F. 
Thomas 44 Industrial Way 
Norwood, MA USA 02062
(  Office Phone - (781) 329-9200
* mail to: r...@asthomas.com [Disclaimer] WARNING- This document may contain 
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[khandy21yo]

There is the Commodore64 OS. Didn't it leave the file system stuff to the disk 
drive?
Is XXDP source available? that would represent a very simple OS.
Cp// was available for several machines, but I wouldn't want to based a new OS 
on it.



Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Rich Alderson 
 Date: 10/26/16  1:06 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] RT-11 source 
> From: Johnny Billquist 
> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2016 03:11:05 +0200

> In fact, I would probably suggest Ray start with just writing some code 
> to do some simple things without looking at existing code. The first 
> thing needed would be to just have something that can load programs from 
> a device, and run them. This will require some simple device driver, 
> some simple file system, and a simple command line interpreter.
   ^^

That's not even needed.  Beyond a 44 character file id in the VTOC on a disk,
none of the IBM batch operating systems for the System/360 has what we would
call a file system.  OS/360 requires the programmer to know how much space a
file might occupy in its lifetime and allocate that (including overflow areas);
DOS/360 requires the programmer to do all of that, *AND IN ADDITION* to define
the exact location of the file on disk.  I don't think anyone would argue that
those operating systems were unsuccessful in the marketplace.

Just sayin'.

    Rich
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[khandy21yo]

Is there a list of OS that have sufficient sources to rebuild it?Would be 
intresting to those who want to play.research OS designs.I suspect a lot of the 
old OS have lost their source code.
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[khandy21yo]

CP/M works a lot like this. But it's for 8989 not PDP11. It's also been ported 
to several other systems. Source code is available, but many folks don't 
consider it an OS.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Johnny Billquist  
Date: 10/22/16  7:11 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: 
[Simh] RT-11 source 
While we're at it then... Ray asked for RT-11, since he felt that it was 
smaller and simpler than most other operating systems available, and 
also because he felt more comfortable with assembler than some other 
language.

Both those points are missed with any Unix-like OS, even if the 
intention is good.

I could just as well offer up RSX, since it actually comes with source 
where the comments are still in place, and it's actually written in 
assembler for the most part as well. However, it is a much more complex 
system than RT-11, and in some ways probably more complex than Unix as 
well. So I don't think it might be a good choice if you just want to 
understand how an OS works.

In fact, I would probably suggest Ray start with just writing some code 
to do some simple things without looking at existing code. The first 
thing needed would be to just have something that can load programs from 
a device, and run them. This will require some simple device driver, 
some simple file system, and a simple command line interpreter. Then you 
can go on an expand from there. You'll soon realize things you want to 
abstract away, and deal with in a somewhat coherent way.
I wouldn't bother with interrupt system, MMU, or any more fancy stuff to 
start with. A plain 64K PDP-11, with the program loader just located in 
one end, and then go from there. Do system calls through TRAP, EMT or 
some other instruction, and then have a vector installed. If the user 
program overwrites that, tough luck.

Johnny

On 2016-10-23 02:45, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> Ray Jewhurst  asks today for documented
> operating system source code for the PDP-11.  Besides the Lions' Unix
> v6 code, there is also Doug Comer's Xinu project about which he wrote
> several books.  Current versions are targeted at x86 and ARM CPUs,
>
>   http://www.xinu.cs.purdue.edu/
>
> but he still provides code for older systems (PDP-11, SPARC, VAX):
>
>   ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/comer/
>
> There is more about him here, including links to his books Web site:
>
>   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Comer
>
> ---
> - Nelson H. F. Beebe    Tel: +1 801 581 5254  
> -
> - University of Utah    FAX: +1 801 581 4148  
> -
> - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu  
> -
> - 155 S 1400 E RM 233   be...@acm.org  be...@computer.org 
> -
> - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ 
> -
> ---
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-- 
Johnny Billquist  || "I'm on a bus
   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive! ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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Re: [Simh] Pdp8 terminals

[khandy21yo]

Just curious,. Is there any thought about emulating any of the Dec mate Line? I 
used to deal with them, mostly as wps8. I don't know what the hardware 
differences are, but I saw a large number of Dec mates and only a few pdp8s. 
How compatible were they?


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Ethan Dicks  
Date: 9/6/16  5:00 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: 
[Simh] Pdp8 terminals 
On Tue, Sep 6, 2016 at 1:03 PM, Johnny Billquist  wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On 2016-09-06 18:55, Bob Supnik wrote:
>>
>> The PDP8 simulator is more or less a PDP8/A, and its terminal
>> "multiplexor" is a KL8-JA, which implements four discrete KL8A style
>> interfaces. These are superset compatible with the PDP8/I's PT08
>> discrete interfaces, and thus TSS/8 will work. Note that TSS/8 supports
>> only four discrete terminal interfaces. To get more than four lines, the
>> configuration must have a DC08(A), a multiplexor for the PDP8/I. The
>> DC08(A) is not implemented at the moment.
>
>
> This can't be correct.
>
> The KL8JA is a single line interface, compatible with the KL8E, but using
> different hardware. You can add lots of KL8E or KL8JA interfaces to a PDP8,
> if you wanted to. Each have a different device code, and that's all there is
> to it. (Talking about the actual hardware here.) In addition, as far as I am
> aware, the programming of these interfaces are pretty much the same as the
> console interface on all other PDP-8 models as well.
>
> The KL8A was a very late device for Omnibus, which require a hex wide box.
> It is a 4 line multiplexor, but the programming interface is nothing like
> the KL8JA or KL8E. In addition, not all lines are the same. And again, you
> can add several of these multiplexers to a machine, if you want to.

Agreed... here are the handle numbers to help clarify what we are all
talking about...

M8319 KL8A PDP-8/A 4 channel serial I/O

M8650 KL8E Asynchronous Data Control (current loop or RS232)
M8655 KL8JA Terminal Control (UART based substitute for M8650)


The KL8E and KL8JA are, AFAIK, not easy (or not possible?) to tell
apart in software.  The KL8A is entirely different - the only time
I've ever used my KL8A was with RTS-8.  I'm not sure I have any OS/8
code that knows how to talk to it.  If it's out there, I'd love to
read it.

>> There was a significant evolution in the PDP8 family's IO controllers
>> from the original 8 and 8/I to the Omnibus-based 8/E and 8/A.

Very true.  I have a bunch of the real hardware spanning the entire
era and, yeah, Omnibus devices and pre-Omnibus devices are commonly
different (I think the console 03/04 interface is, up to the DECmate
era, the most compatible across the spectrum).

-ethan
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Re: [Simh] Interdata OS/32 question

[khandy21yo]

It could be many things. Without seeing the text, it will be hard to help you,
On Debian, you can start 'script' before ssh to capture your session into 
'typescript',. See 'man script' for detai,s. After exiting ssh, exit bash to 
close script.
You could be dealing with a parity issue, or the 127s someone else talked about 
could be doing something weird like utf8. Parity would be my bet.

Gaa. Ignore any of the stupid autocorrect crud in  this message.
 Original message From: Gene Irwin  Date: 
9/1/16  7:51 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: Davis Johnson , 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Interdata OS/32 question 
I am using bash under the arm 64 version of debian mate on a pine64.  I am 
remoting in using ssh. The remote system is bash under Linux mint.
After going through the guide to build a system from tapes there is a section 
that enables more terminals, disks and probably other things.  All is well 
until this point.  After the system and install the system gets rebooted into 
the new configuration.
It is at that time when things go sideways.
All the text printed by OS/32 now has control characters with it and it doesn't 
seem to understand input any more.  If you do a set time command and hit enter 
the cursor returns to the beginning of the line but I can't tell if the prompt 
appears again due to the control characters at the beginning of the line.
I don't know how to record a session or I would provide a log.

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016, 3:29 AM Davis Johnson  wrote:
Assume for the moment you are running OS/32 and MTM, not reliance or

other software on top of OS/32 that needs a specific terminal.



There are two big issues you have with using a VT-100 emulator (or a

real VT-100, for that matter) on OS/32:



OS/32 defaults to using 7F (177 for you DEC folks) characters for pads,

instead of NUL characters. A VT displays that as a half-intensity filled

character cell. The actual original VT-100 turned on 50% of the pixels

in the character cell in a checker board pattern. You can get rid of

these entirely in MTM. Eliminating them from the console is more

problematic. When I have more time I can provide more detail.



OS/32 expects a control-h (08, or 010) as a backspace. A VT sends 7F.

This one is harder to fix - you can train yourself to type control-h or

do some more involved patching.



I'll have more time this evening.



On 08/31/2016 10:19 PM, Don Stalkowski wrote:

> On Wed Aug 31 14:51:02 2016 girwin1...@gmail.com (Gene Irwin) wrote:

>> I have managed to work my way through a good deal of the os/32 setup

>> process but after the build of the new os the system seems to want a

>> Perkins Elmer 550 or 1100 terminal to operate now.  I  don't know how to

>> make the shell connect to the simh console in another mode.

>>

>> Can someone point me in the right direction to finish this?

> Hi Gene,

>

> Can you post the portion of the console dialog that asks for the

> Perkin Elmer terminals?

>

> Don

>

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>



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Re: [Simh] slightly off-topic where can I find the Compaq basic translator?

[khandy21yo]

If you are talking about Vax basic, then I hate been playing with a basic to 
c++ translator in my spare time,. It may not do the whole job, but it might be 
easier than starting from scratch.
It's on github called btran under khandy21yo.
It  may, or may not work for you.
There was a commercial Vax basic translator someone did (sector7?) but I don't 
know much more than that.
 Original message From: Dan Gahlinger <dgahl...@hotmail.com> 
Date: 7/20/16  12:45 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: [Simh] 
slightly off-topic where can I find the Compaq basic   translator? 

does anyone know where I can find the Compaq basic translator?
or have a copy they can let me use?



I have a ton of old vax basic code but every basic is different and trying to 
do it manually is a pain.



ultimately I'd like the code to run on Linux. in whatever language. there's a 
bunch of basics there too.



I don't care for visual basic. I loved the simple elegance of vax basic nothing 
since has come close. esp eg indexed files.



thanks



Dan










Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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Re: [Simh] Question about card readers.

[khandy21yo]

I once saw a IBM punch card that was small as a playing card, had three rows of 
8? Punches, and held more than 80 characters. The operators actually used them 
as playing cards.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A Original message From: Robert 
Armstrong  Date: 05/26/2016  1:55 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Question about card readers. 
> IBM 96-column cards ... the IBM System/3 and perhaps other

  And UNIVAC had a 90 column card for a long time.  It looked something like a 
traditional Hollerith card but had round punches and two rows of six bit 
characters.

Bob
 


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Re: [Simh] Way out idea for simh

[khandy21yo]

The Kermit protocol isn't very comp,icated, is well documented, and has a lot 
of testing behind it.
What happens in your protocol with characters that devices between you and the 
simulator mangle. Modems were a major frustration, now you have all sorts of  
effort devices may do funny things with certain   haracters. Send the wrong 
characters and it could disconnect.
We've been through this before, why not make use of that experience.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A Original message From: Sampsa Laine 
 Date: 04/20/2016  2:35 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: Phil Budne 
, "simh@trailing-edge.com"  Subject: 
Re: [Simh] Way out idea for simh 

> On 20 Apr 2016, at 23:25, Phil Budne  wrote:
> 
> Ken.Cornetet wrote:
>> I guess I need to shout this:
>> *** KERMIT DOES NOT WORK ON SIMH EMULATED RTE-6/VM 
> 
> Why not?
> 
>> Kermit does not exist (and probably couldn't feasibly exist) on any earlier 
>> versions of RTE.
> 
> Again, why not?
> 
> Having just written a new shell for PDP-7 UNIX (because the original
> could not be found), I can't imagine much other than a lack of
> something resembling a serial console that would prevent _some_
> version/subset of KERMIT (or something similar like X or ZMODEM) from
> being cobbled together.
> 

And since the connection can be assumed to be lossless, the protocol could be 
really simple, e.g. something like this:

G=Guest, H=Host

Example of a write operation..

G:  WRITE-FILE
H:  ACK
// Now we send the file structure / word size etc
G:  FILE-META-DATA
G:  
H:  ACK
G:  FILE-DATA
G:  
G:  ACK

Done.


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Re: [Simh] Way out idea for simh

[khandy21yo]

Kermit has something ,Ike this built into it over the serial line. Look I to 
its remote commands. Doesn't need anything beyond the existing serial or 
console port.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A Original message From: Ken Cornetet 
 Date: 04/20/2016  1:47 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: [Simh] Way out idea for simh 


Actually, here’s an alternate way to allow easy file transfers. I’m starting to 
think this is a much better idea.
 
Create a new device for simh that is identical to a paper tape punch/reader 
except If the guest OS writes a magic string, the next character after the 
magic string is a command, and the following characters up to a newline are a 
file name.
 
From that point on, guest writes to the punch would write to the given file, 
and reads from the reader would read from the given file.
 
The command character would be “t” for open the file in text mode, “b” for open 
in binary mode, and “c” for close.
 
As an extension, if the file name contains shell wildcard characters, simh 
would return the matching file names when the guest reads the tape reader.
 
If the simh guest doesn’t support paper tape, then the device could be mapped 
to some other sort of simple IO device (like a serial port).
 
Again, perhaps not all simh machines could make use of this, but many could.


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Re: [Simh] text from openvms

[khandy21yo]

Most versions of Linux have a program  "dos2unix" and "unix2dos" for that 
problem. It may need to be installed, depending on which distribution you have.


Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A Original message From: Bob Supnik 
 Date: 03/25/2016  1:59 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] text from openvms 
1. Attach a  (new) host file to the simulated printer on VMS.
2. Print your VMS text file to file to the simulated printer.
3. Let some time elapse, to make sure the print spooler finishes.
4. Detach file from the simulated printer.
5. VMS text file is now on your host in the host file you specified in 
step 1.

The LP11 printer is very dumb. It requires carriage returns and 
linefeeds for proper sequencing, so you end up with a correctly 
formatted Windows text file. Linux should be able to eat that directly; 
if it needs the carriage returns removed, there are utilities to do that 
(see ASC in the simtools package).

/Bob

On 3/25/2016 2:51 PM, simh-requ...@trailing-edge.com wrote:
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2016 14:23:35 -0500
> From: "Bill Cunningham"
> To:
> Subject: [Simh] text from openvms
> Message-ID: <2F1F92FAE2FF4B2FB298AD1D3C4C36C3@apxtz6bip7fvgk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>  I have been studying the best way to copy from a vax simulator with 
>openvms to a linux host, text files. The Docs look like telnet and kermit are 
>the way to do it. So is there not a device like ISO that I can copy TOO? I 
>wouldn't think because cdrom is RO after all. and 'set rq writeenable' isn't 
>working nor is anything to do with cdrom working.
>
>  There may be several ways to do this. I am not concerned so much about 
>binary files as several .txt files. Am I on the right track with telnet and 
>kermit from those who have attempted and done this?
>
> Bill

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Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 145, Issue 52

[khandy21yo]

Like a RSTS watch?





 Original message 
From li...@openmailbox.org 
Date: 02/16/2016  9:54 AM  (GMT-07:00) 
To simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 145, Issue 52 
 
On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 17:49:27 +0100
Johnny Billquist  wrote:

> On 2016-02-16 17:43, li...@openmailbox.org wrote:
> > On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:40:09 -0500
> > William Pechter  wrote:
> >
> >> Actually, one of DEC's biggest mistakes was not OEMing the uVax
> >> chips... They would've killed the 68k had they had the uVaxII chipset
> >> available for early workstations.
> >
> > I'm not so sure about that. The 68k was used in an awful lot of devices
> > from handhelds (Palm) to TI calculators and a whole lot more than
> > workstations. Could handheld devices in that day run microVax chips?
> 
> For a lot of embedded, low power stuff, it would have made more sense to 
> use PDP-11s. But DEC had those chips as well, and was somewhat unwilling 
> in that market too. Imagine if they had tries to really push for getting 
> PDP-11s out there in all kind of devices, and made one or two more 
> implementations to shrink and reduce power... That could have been nice.

You're just saying that because you want to run an RSX-based smartphone ;-)

In all seriousness with today's FPGAs and microcontrollers you can probably
make just about any battery-powered device you could think up.
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Re: [Simh] OSs with accessible documentation

[khandy21yo]

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

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

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

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

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

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

paul


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Re: [Simh] [Announce] Emacs 21.2 for VMS/VAX

[khandy21yo]

I always found emacs a bit of a pain on VMS because of its reliance on control 
characters. If Control/s didnt get caught by the OS, the terminal server would 
grab it.

 Original message 
From Ken Cornetet  
Date: 02/01/2016  6:50 AM  (GMT-07:00) 
To simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] [Announce] Emacs 21.2 for VMS/VAX 
 
For many years, MicroEmacs was my favorite editor, and I still fire up the 
windows version on occasion when I need to do some complicated substitutions on 
text.

Sadly, Dan Lawrence, the author of MicroEmacs 4 passed away several years ago. 
No one picked up support for his version. MicroEmacs 3.8 was forked by an 
outfit called jasspa. It was improved and the license changed to GPL. I don't 
see VMS listed as supported, though.

As far a MicroEmacs not being good for coding, interesting bit of trivia: 
MicroEmacs was the only editor on Linus Torvalds' systems for a long time.

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of 
li...@openmailbox.org
Sent: Monday, February 1, 2016 2:52 AM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] [Announce] Emacs 21.2 for VMS/VAX

Hopefully the following information will be of some interest and value to 
people running VMS/VAX on SIMH.

Because of keyboard issues I found the native VMS editors to be difficult to 
use. I have been using Emacs for a long time on other platforms so I went 
looking for a copy to run on VMS/VAX but couldn't find a binary. I don't have 
the skills or tools to build Emacs from source on VMS/VAX.

I have been using MicroEmacs 4.0 which is stable and runs very well on a low 
spec SIMH host. However the features are minimal bordering on spartan.
It's not a very good editor for coding and seems to be relatively unsupported 
although old builds are available for VMS/VAX. An appeal for help on the 
post-fork MicroEmacs mailing list yielded thundering silence.

I brought up the issue on comp.os.mvs and one of the guys spent some time 
getting gnu Emacs 21.2 working. There were a few problems initially but he 
seems to have gotten it working. The performance on a low spec SIMH host is 
unacceptable but on a reasonably modern PC it works great.

With the permission of the developer who built and got it working, I am 
reposting the info from comp.os.vms here. Many thanks to hb  
for his generosity in making this available.

Any issues, discussion, etc. please follow up to comp.os.vms on usenet.

---
I uploaded emacs21_2_vax.zip to https://www.sendspace.com/file/byw8z7.
Feel free to announce it on any other mailing list and/or copy the zip archive 
to a VMS specific archive/repository.

--- 8< ---

This is the readme file of the emacs kit for VAX: emacs21_2_vax.zip.

GNU Emacs 21.2 for VAX/VMS

Contents of emacs21_2_vax.zip:

emacs21_2_vax.txt - this file
emacs-vax-bin.txt - how to use the binary kit emacs-vax-build.txt - how to 
build emacs from the sources emacs21_2_vax_bin.zip - the binary kit 
emacs21_2_vax_src.zip - VAX specific files for building emacs

The binary kit was built on V7.3 without support for TCPIP and X11:
$ @[-.emacs212_3]configure --with-tcpip=NO --with-x=NO --WITH-X-TOOLKIT=NO -
    --prefix=bld_root:[LOCAL] --startupdir=bld_root:[LOCAL.STARTUP]

Building for any other configuration may require additional source code 
changes. The supplied VAX specific sources are not intended to be compiled on 
other VMS platforms. Some of the files may be seen as hacks to get emacs 
running on VAX/VMS. The base source code for emacs is not included in this kit. 
The base source code is a VMS version based on emacs version 21.2. The source 
code can be found on the OpenVMS freeware CD version V8.0: emacs/emacs21_2.zip. 
These sources are for building emacs for Alpha. This zip archive contains 
temporary files, which are not required for the build, as well as an Alpha 
executable image.
Unfortunately these sources were not found in the emacs git repository on 
savannah.gnu.org.

Please note, officially the support for VMS was removed in Emacs 23.
---

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Re: [Simh] RSTS/E 10.1-L and Paper tape

[khandy21yo]

Copyright laws werechanged to keep Mickey Mojuse protected many years back, 
anyrfing after 1820 is cmplicated. Many of the rules were changed. Oroject 
gutenberg has a lot mire information about it.

 Original message 
From Timothe Litt  
Date: 01/08/2016  1:19 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] RSTS/E 10.1-L and Paper tape 
 
On 08-Jan-16 14:44, Larry Baker wrote:
Paul,

That is correct.  In X3.27-1978 (version 3) and earlier, date fields are 6 
characters " YYDDD".  The first character must be a space.  In X3.27-1987 
(version 4), the first character in date fields is either a space or a 0.  " 
YYDDD" are 19YY dates, "0YYDDD" are 20YY dates.


I have paper copies of -1978 and -1987.  I don't think it's legal to put them 
up on bitsavers, though.  I think you still have to purchase copies from 
whoever publishes them now.

Larry Baker
US Geological Survey
650-329-5608
ba...@usgs.gov
My paper copy of 78 has a copyright.  It also has a restriction on 
reproduction in any form, including electronic.

My paper copy of 87 is a printout of a text file that does not.  Might have 
come from a DEC committee member, though the title page includes "Approved 
March 16, 1987".

CBEMA was the secretariat that produced these standards.

I don't know what ANSI's (or INCITS, the successor to CBEMA's) policy is on 
re-distribution of obsolete versions of its standards.  

Those interested can ask ANSI for permission to put them on bitsavers for 
historical research purposes.  One doesn't know what they'll say without 
asking... "yes" is possible.

ANSI customer service is: i...@ansi.org
INCITS: inc...@itic.org

Historical research/preservation as a reason often unlocks doors.

The 1978 version might be off copyright depending on when it was registered.  
It was approved in 1977, so it would have expired after 28 years if not 
renewed.  Would anyone have bothered?  But the rules are complicated.  See 
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ15a.pdf.

The 1987 version would be under the new copyright rules, modulo the fact that 
my copy doesn't have a copyright statement.

Have fun.


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Re: [Simh] VAX sim: rqb address?

[khandy21yo]

Would it be possible for tge error messages to dsplay tge fully expanded 
command that caused tge error as oart of the message!
Yhis would also help debug ini files. Right now you just ger an error message 
witg  no contest.

 Original message 
From Mark Pizzolato  
Date: 11/01/2015  8:19 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To Cory Smelosky  
Cc simh@trailing-edge.com,Mark Pizzolato  
Subject Re: [Simh] VAX sim: rqb address? 
 
On Sunday, November 1, 2015 at 6:00 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Nov 2015, Mark Pizzolato wrote:
> 
> > Hi Cory,
> >
> > Off list here..
> >
> >> sim> echo %SET%
> >
> 
> [csmelosky@maelona ~]$ ~/simh/BIN/vax
> 
> MicroVAX 3900 simulator V4.0-0 Beta    git commit id: fa407e67
> sim> echo %SET%
> 
> sim> show dz
> DZ  address=2040-205F*, vector=2C0-2DC*, lines=16
>  not attached, 8b
> sim> set dz dis
> Invalid argument

Well, this is a big DUHH!!

Please try:

    sim> set dz DISABLE

instead of:

    sim> set dz DIS

Since "DISconnect=line" is one of the command options for the DZ device, the 
argument is indeed invalid.  I'll see if I can make the error message more 
informative (like: "missing argument value"), but that might still not be clear 
given the blinders we both had on while looking at this.

- Mark

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Re: [Simh] Problem with default builds

[khandy21yo]

Wasnr rgere a recent change to tge SWMASK macro,
Gcc peobably optimizes this reference, but dev c must not.

 Original message 
From Alan Frisbie fris...@flying-disk.com 
Date: 08/06/2015  8:53 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To SIMH@trailing-edge.com 
Subject [Simh] Problem with default builds 
 
Another build error.   Unfortunately, I do not have the knowledge
to fix it myself.

Today, 6-Aug-2015, I downloaded the current simh-master.zip from
github.

My host is an Alpha XP1000 running VMS v8.4

Using MMK from the VMS Freeware 8 CD, I tried to do a default
build of all SIMH simulators.   All went well until the build of
ID16-AXP.OLB Library.   At that point I got the error:

    { DP, SWMASK ('F'), 9, 0x32, o_DP0, o_DPF },
^
%CC-E-NEEDCONSTEXPR, In the initializer for dboot_tab[1].sw,
sim_swmask(...) is not constant, but occurs in a context that requires a 
constant
expression.
at line number 318 in file 
DKA200:[FRISBIE.SIMH.SIMH-MASTER.INTERDATA]ID16_DBOOT.C;4
%MMK-F-ERRUPD, error status %X10B91262 occurred when updating
target SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB]ID16-AXP.OLB


The log of the build (with lots of successful stuff snipped)
follows below.

Thanks,
Alan Frisbie

--

$ unzip simh-master.zip
Archive:  DKA200:[FRISBIE.SIMH]SIMH-MASTER.ZIP;5
7c7b44e409f05751c960a614dbb1e2abde22da60
replace [.simh-master].gitattributes? [y]es, [n]o, [A]ll, [N]one, [r]ename: A

  inflating: [.simh-master].gitattributes
  inflating: [.simh-master].gitignore
  inflating: [.simh-master]0readmeAsynchIO.txt
  inflating: [.simh-master]0readme_39.txt
...
  inflating: [.simh-master.swtp6800.swtp6800]swtp6800mp-a2.ini
  inflating: [.simh-master.swtp6800.swtp6800]swtp_defs.h
  inflating: [.simh-master.swtp6800.swtp6800]swtp_swtbug_bin.h
$
$ set default [.simh-master]
$ $ set file/attri=rfm:stm makefile,*.mms,[...]*.c,[...]*.h,[...]*.txt
$
$ mmk
$!
$! Building The SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB]SIMH-NONET-AXP.OLB
Library.
$!
$ CC/DECC/PREF=ALL/DEBUG/OPT=(LEV=5)/ARCH=HOST 
/NEST=PRIMARY/NAME=(AS_IS,SHORT)/DEF=(_LA
RGEFILE,SIM_ASYNCH_IO=1)  /OBJ=SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB.BLD-AXP]
SYS$DISK:[]SIM_CONSOLE.C
,SYS$DISK:[]SIM_SOCK.C,SYS$DISK:[]SIM_TMXR.C,SYS$DISK:[]SIM_ETHER.C,SYS$DISK:[]SIM_TAPE.C,
SYS$DISK:[]SIM_FIO.C,SYS$DISK:[]SIM_TIMER.C,SYS$DISK:[]SIM_DISK.C,SYS$DISK:[]SIM_SERIAL.C,
SYS$DISK:[]SIM_VIDEO.C
$ IF (F$SEARCH(SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB]SIMH-NONET-AXP.OLB).EQS.)
THEN  LIBRARY/CREATE SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB]SIMH-NONET-AXP.OLB
$ LIBRARY/REPLACE SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB]SIMH-NONET-AXP.OLB
SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB.BLD-AXP]*.OBJ
$ DELETE/NOLOG/NOCONFIRM SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB.BLD-AXP]*.OBJ;*
$!
$! Building The SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB]ALTAIR-AXP.OLB Library.
...
...
$! IBM1130 done
$!
$! Building The SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LIB]ID16-AXP.OLB Library.
$!
$ CC/DECC/PREF=ALL/DEBUG/OPT=(LEV=5)/ARCH=HOST 
/NEST=PRIMARY/NAME=(AS_IS,SHORT)/INCL=(SYS
$DISK:[],SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA])/DEF=(_LARGEFILE,SIM_ASYNCH_IO=1) 
/OBJ=SYS$DISK:[.BIN.
VMS.LIB.BLD-AXP]
SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID16_CPU.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID16_SYS.C,SYS$DISK:
[.INTERDATA]ID_DP.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID_FD.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID_FP.C,SYS$DISK:[.I
NTERDATA]ID_IDC.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID_IO.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID_LP.C,SYS$DISK:[.INT
ERDATA]ID_MT.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID_PAS.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID_PT.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTER
DATA]ID_TT.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID_UVC.C,SYS$DISK:[.INTERDATA]ID16_DBOOT.C,SYS$DISK:[.IN
TERDATA]ID_TTP.C

    { DP, SWMASK ('F'), 9, 0x32, o_DP0, o_DPF },
^
%CC-E-NEEDCONSTEXPR, In the initializer for dboot_tab[1].sw,
sim_swmask(...) is not constant, but occurs in a context that requires a 
constant
expression.
at line number 318 in file 
DKA200:[FRISBIE.SIMH.SIMH-MASTER.INTERDATA]ID16_DBOOT.C;4
%MMK-F-ERRUPD, error status %X10B91262 occurred when updating target 
SYS$DISK:[.BIN.VMS.LI
B]ID16-AXP.OLB
$

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Re: [Simh] vector images

[khandy21yo]

Long ago, there was an ooerating system for intel 8080 based machines called 
cpm.
Many companies builf computers that  used this operating system, like the 
altair, imsai, osborne, kaypro, and vector graPhics to name a few.
Many years later, the rimh altairz80 emulator was written with the abiliry ro 
emulate the vector graphic machines, but the only copy of the necessary config 
and disk images  was wrapped up in a miceosoft install file called setup.msi.
This file format requires a microsoft windoes setup to extract the files into a 
ubable form, whike installing many extra libraries ans applications sure to 
render your windiws machine unusable. 
What I would like is to get the disk images and config files witgout 
sacrificing a windows machine, which I would gave to borroe ftom an 
unsuspecting victim.
The install file setup.msi was found by following the instructions in the 
altairz80 manual.



 Original message 
From pigi dott.piergior...@gmail.com 
Date: 07/16/2015  1:56 AM  (GMT-07:00) 
To simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] vector images 
 
Il 16/07/2015 01:12, Kevin Handy ha scritto:
 I was curious about the vector imges (for altairz80), but the only copy I
 can find is in a Microsoft install format. However, I don't have a spare
 windows machine to try unpacking this on. Anyone have copies that are not
 embedded in a Microsoft install file?
 I tried extracting them from the file, but ended up with a large number of
 files with horrible names and no way to translate them.

I'm not sure of what you mean with vector images (for altairz80) but 
perhaps a look on Mr. Schorn itself's page on altairz80 can help, for 
example, at the end of this one:

 http://schorn.ch/altair_5.php

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.


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Re: [Simh] Off topic: ULTRIX question

[khandy21yo]

Fwiw, netbsd was the first OS fully booted on simh vax. Vms took a lot more 
debuggibg. 

 Original message 
From Alexander Schreiber a...@thangorodrim.ch 
Date: 07/13/2015  4:29 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To Gary Lee Phillips tivo.ov...@gmail.com 
Cc simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] Off topic: ULTRIX question 
 
On Sun, Jul 12, 2015 at 10:04:43AM -0500, Gary Lee Phillips wrote:
 As far as I know, Solaris these days only runs on Intel hardware. I've
 tried it there, and it seems to devote way too much processor power
 and memory to making pretty windowed screen displays (a weakness it
 shares with most Linux distributions.)

Hmm? I run Linux on quite a number of different machines (and different
hardware architectures as well). Out of all of those, only four devote
_any_ amount of CPU and RAM to pretty displays: the workstations for my
wife and me and our laptops. Some of the others don't even have the
_hardware_ for showing pretty graphics (like the Edgerouter Lite,
whose only console is a serial one with a Cisco style connector).

 I guess I didn't make it clear that I'm looking for UNIX to run on VAX
 or Alpha hardware platforms.

Try NetBSD. For fun  giggles I ran NetBSD on simh/vax for a while.
Was surprising usable interactively, only disk access and compiles
where slow. NetBSD also is comparatively lightweight among modern
Unix systems.

Kind regards,
   Alex.
-- 
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work.  -- Thomas A. Edison
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Re: [Simh] PDP-10/RP06 Disk Image Size

[khandy21yo]

Bad blocks

 Original message 
From Rob Doyle radioe...@gmail.com 
Date: 04/12/2015  11:07 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject [Simh] PDP-10/RP06 Disk Image Size 
 
I'm designing an RH11 disk controller for my KS10 FPGA. I'd like to
use the SIMH data format for the media.

I noticed that an RP06 disk image from SIMH is 315,187,200 bytes.

Assuming an RP06 has 815 cylinders, 19 heads, 20 sectors (confirmed
in SIMH code) - I calculate that disk image should be 317,132,800
bytes.

If use 810 cylinders (instead of 815), I get the size of the of the
image file.

SIMH doesn't pack data: there are 128 words per sector and each
word occupies 64-bits or 8 bytes.  Therefore a sector is 1024 bytes.

What's am I missing?

Rob

--
KS10 FPGA Project at: http://www.techtravels.org/KS10FPGA/
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Re: [Simh] Sigma disk design notes

[khandy21yo]

I wouldnt get too hung uo on only allowing combinations that real hardware 
allowed. I see no oeoblems eith plugging anrl02 image into a eqdx3, as .long as 
the software can habdle it. It may be useful doing conversions for examole.




Sent from Samsung tablet

 Original message 
From Bob Supnik b...@supnik.org 
Date: 10/30/2014  12:57 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject [Simh] Sigma disk design notes 
 
As I get ready to restart the Sigma project, I've gone back through the 
Sigma disk specs. My notes are attached. The current simulation module 
is not accurate, most notably in the way it allows controller/disk
pairings that didn't exist in real life.

Comments are welcome.

/Bob

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Re: [Simh] MicroVAX II QVSS support problems in SIMH beta

[khandy21yo]

Check the text console, thr screen terminal you booted on, and see where it is,
If the emulator hasnt booted yet, you only see random garbage. You dont get to 
talk on the gui screeb umtil the cax is running.

Sent from Samsung tablet

 Original message 
From Michael Kerpan mjker...@kerpan.com 
Date: 10/14/2014  7:46 AM  (GMT-07:00) 
To simh@trailing-edge.com Simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject [Simh] MicroVAX II QVSS support problems in SIMH beta 
 
All the talk about the SIMH 4 beta got me to look at the GIT repo and
I was pleased to see that many new VAXen have been simulated, and that
the MicroVAX II simulator includes support for a QVSS monochrome
framebuffer. However, when I boot it up with the QVSS enabled, I get a
random, gabled image rather than seeing the boot console. I know from
screenshots at 9track.net, that this code works on other systems, but
it's not working on mine. I'm running Linux and my SDL versions are
1.2.15 and 2.0.3? Everything compiledcleany, so I'd assume it;s not a
library issue, nut one never knows.

Mike
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Re: [Simh] altairZ80 floppy disk binary files

[khandy21yo]

Another series of machines based on the bigboaed are the Kaypro series of cpm 
machones.
A good source of information about bigboard machines is the Microcornycopia 
magaxines, I think that they are acailacle online somewhere. That magazine also 
sold technical documents about the various systens,
It would be great if the altairz80 could emulate a Kaypeo19.



Sent from Samsung tablet

 Original message 
From Gregg Levine gregg.drw...@gmail.com 
Date: 09/22/2014  6:28 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To Malcolm Macleod malc...@avitech.com.au 
Cc simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] altairZ80 floppy disk binary files 
 
Hello!
I'd say you've managed to obtain a for real wowser there. The boards
are amazing. One of them, according to the Wikipedia page, probably
the Xerox 820 also used one of the BB2 devices.

I have here an oddball in a standard S100 box, I've been in the
process of restoring for the past several years. So far all I can
discern about it is that it's originally a microprocessor trainer for
the I8080 processor.

And from what I recall about the software you're working with then yes
you do need to do that.

I suggest you take a look at the Xerox 820 just for backup purposes,
that is to support your work.

Too bad you're over in your part of AU I'd love to see your work

Good luck and all of that.
-
Gregg C Levine gregg.drw...@gmail.com
This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again.


On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 8:17 PM, Malcolm Macleod malc...@avitech.com.au wrote:
 Hi Gregg,

 The original Ferguson Big Board (BB1) was released in about 1980.  It's a 
 single-board computer running CP/M 2.2.  It has 64KB of onboard dynamic RAM, 
 a 2.5MHz Z-80 CPU, 1771 FDC and on-board 80x24 video.  It has the same 
 footprint as an 8 floppy drive.  There's a Wikipedia page on it - 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_Big_Board

 I was aware of the BB1 when I was a kid.  But never owned one at the time.  I 
 acquired 3 of these (2 x BB1, 1 x BB2) a few years ago.  One of these was 
 mounted in a homebrew aluminium case with two full-height 8 drives.  It came 
 with boxes of 8 floppies, and I'm working my way through those and learning 
 about the original-owner's modifications to the on-board monitor ROM and to 
 the CP/M CBIOS (which is also in the ROM).  My immediate goal is to further 
 modify the CBIOS to work with 3.5 drives (in place of the 8 drives).  I've 
 already got it working with single-sided 3.5 disks. The problem is that the 
 CBIOS looks for a signal from the 8 drives (which the 3.5 drives don't 
 have) to determine whether a single-sided or double-sided disk in in the 
 drive.  So I want to modify this code to make it not dependent on the input 
 signal.

 Malcolm.

 -Original Message-
 From: Gregg Levine [mailto:gregg.drw...@gmail.com]
 Sent: Tuesday, 23 September 2014 9:25 AM
 To: Malcolm Macleod
 Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
 Subject: Re: [Simh] altairZ80 floppy disk binary files

 Hello!
 Malcolm, what is a Ferguson Big Board ROM? I mean obviously its the board's 
 ROM array, but what is a  Ferguson Big Board to begin with? Is it a computer 
 that ran the OS back when such things were more commonplace?
 -
 Gregg C Levine gregg.drw...@gmail.com
 This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again.


 On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:14 PM, Malcolm Macleod malc...@avitech.com.au 
 wrote:
 Hi Peter,

 Thanks for the fast response.

 That worked, when used with the SIMH command SET HDSK1 FORMAT=SSSD8S.

 Note that I needed to use altairZ80.exe downloaded from your site for this 
 to work (ie V3.9-0 build 1625).  The Windows executable of V3.9-0 
 downloaded from the main SIMH site generated errors mounting the IMD file.

 FYI - I'm using altairZ80 to rebuild a Ferguson Big Board ROM from source.  
 AltairZ80 is a great platform for this work.  Thanks for making it available.

 Malcolm.

 -Original Message-
 From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Peter
 Schorn
 Sent: Tuesday, 23 September 2014 3:03 AM
 To: simh@trailing-edge.com
 Subject: Re: [Simh] altairZ80 floppy disk binary files

 Hi

 1. The file format for the AltairZ80 DSK device is basically a sequence of 
 77 tracks with 32 sectors of 137 bytes (CP/M 2 can also handle disks with 
 254 tracks). This is modeled after the FD-400 hard-sectored floppy drive.

 2. If you want to mount an IMD disk under CP/M 2 use the cpm2.zip from
 here http://schorn.ch/cpm/zip/cpm2.zip and use the command

 attach hdsk1 yourfile.imd

 to mount the IMD file yourfile as disk J:

 Note that the BIOS of the supplied CP/M 2.2 only supports 128 bytes
 sectors. I updated cpm2.zip to include cpm2_imd which demonstrates
 this
 - just use altairz80 cpm2_imd and a blank SSSD 8” IMD will be mounted on 
 drive J:

 Peter
 -
 peter.sch...@acm.org


 On 22.09.14 14:32, Malcolm Macleod wrote:
 A couple of questions about virtual-floppy-drive files under altairZ80.exe:



 1.   SIMH’s file-format for 

Re: [Simh] Possibly a n00b configuration error

[khandy21yo]

If I remember correctly, simh started out with the ka655 version, which is the 
code from an actual machine. Then  thr rmulatoe was modifies to handle more 
memoet than a real machine rver had, and the ka655x version was cewares0d to 
deal with the extra eam.

If you reduce the nenory configured, the other eom might work.



Sent from Samsung tablet

 Original message 
From Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm m...@infocomm.com 
Date: 09/20/2014  6:25 AM  (GMT-07:00) 
To Mark Wickens m...@wickensonline.co.uk,simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] Possibly a n00b configuration error 
 
HI Mark,

On Saturday, September 20, 2014 at 4:00 AM, Mark Wickens wrote:
 A quick configuration question if I could be so bold. Ever since I can
 remember my startup script for the VAX 3900 has halted with an error:
 
 msw@hpm:/usr/local/vax/bin$ sudo ./vax
 
 VAX simulator V3.9-0
 NVR: buffering file in memory
 Eth: opened OS device eth3
 Listening on port 2023 (socket 9)
 
 
 KA655-B V5.3, VMB 2.7
 Performing normal system tests.
 40..39..38..37..36..35..34..33..32..31..30..29..28..27..26..25..
 24..23..22..21..20..19..18..17..16..15..14..13..12..11..10..09..
 
 ?80 2 17 FF 00 
 
 P1=0100  P2=  P3=  P4=0088  P5=
 P6=  P7=  P8=03FC  P9=303FFE00 P10=1FFF
 r0=  r1=20088000  r2=  r3=3040  r4=03FF4000
 r5=  r6=0400  r7=3000  r8=8000 ERF=8000
 
 08..07..06..05..04..03..
 Normal operation not possible.
 
  
 
 
 Is this expected behaviour, or a configuration issue? I'd like to have
 the SIMH instance to boot into VMS automatically on server start up if
 possible, as I'm always forgetting to go in there and continue the boot
 process.
 
 My configuration file is as below. Thanks for the help!

If this always happens, then it might be expected behavior, given the pieces 
you are working with. :-)

 ;add CPU microcode
 load -r /usr/local/vax/data/ka655.bin
  
This is slightly suspicious.

The remaining configuration file is fine.

Please explain:
1) What host system you're running on.
2) Where you got the suspicious boot rom image you are loading.

Alternatively:
1) Pick up the latest code from: https://github.com/simh/simh/archive/master.zip
2) Unzip it
3) make vax

Use the resulting BIN/vax simulator AND in your configuration, don't bother 
loading the suspicious ka655.bin.  The current simulator will provide the 
right ROM image and automatically load when you do the boot CPU to start 
execution.  This is only done if you haven't already loaded 'some', possibly 
suspicious, ROM image, so you could still have the same problem even with the 
latest code.  

If this fixes your problem, please remove the suspicious ROM image from your 
host system and either let the automatically generated (and loaded) one be used 
or replace the suspicious ka655.bin on your system (and mentioned in the 
configuration) with the ka655x.bin provided in the current source.

Good Luck,

- Mark

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Re: [Simh] Standalone boot on vax8600?

[khandy21yo]

Might these umfinished operations cause problems? Unflushed disk buffers  
during shutdown for example.

 Original message 
From Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm m...@infocomm.com 
Date: 07/10/2014  5:08 PM  (GMT-07:00) 
To Cory Smelosky b...@gewt.net,Simh s...@alohasunset.com 
Cc simh@trailing-edge.com 
Subject Re: [Simh] Standalone boot on vax8600? 
 
On Thursday, July 10, 2014 at 3:13 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
 On Thu, 10 Jul 2014, Henry Bent wrote:
 
  Well, that at least did something different.
 
  sim boot rq0 /r5:8
  Loading boot code from vmb.exe
  %BOOT-F-Unexpected Exceptio
 
  The 8600 simulator always seems to cut off the last character of its
  messages, I wonder if that's in any way related to the other console
  problems.
 
 
 780, 750, and 730 have the same issue...along with not actually booting from
 the console RL, floppy, et al.

The last character output in a message just prior to executing a HALT 
instruction is not surprising since the simulator implements a delay (as a 
number of instructions executed) from when the data is put in the output 
register prior to generating the completion interrupt/status.  The halt 
instruction gets executed before the delay number of instructions have 
completed.  Even if that was 'fixed', nothing operational would change.  The 
reason the message has been generated will still exist.

As for direct support for booting an OS from the console media, the 8600 
supports BOOT CS /R5:xx to boot from the console RL02.  Other than that, 
VMB.EXE is actually performing the boot operation and I think that when I 
checked VMB didn't know how to boot from console floppies on a 780, but it can 
boot from the console TU58 on both the 730 and 750 (BOOT TD /R5:xx).

  I tried the standalone boot on the other VAX sims (microvax 1, 2,
  3900, and
  rtvax1000) and they are all able to load the booter and take console
  input (I didn't actually try booting).  This seems to point to there
  being a problem with the console on the 8600.  Any tips for where I
  should look to narrow down where the problem might be?

What media have you tested with on the other (qbus) VAX simulators?

- Mark

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