Il 22/08/2010 19:11, Rich Alderson ha scritto:
Hopefully, Rich will be able to provide some more code from the
tapes they received from Harlan once the machine is running again.
I'll do what I can, but there is a problem right up front: They did not
use standard DECtapes! They wrote huge data blocks containing 8K words
so that a memory bank could be filled or dumped in a single operation.
really marvelous... the only surviving copy of an historical OS is an
hacked copy.... and decsys-7 itself having also at least three
chronological layers of coding, will be not an easy work figuring out
how U of OR has modded the binary tape we have here....
This reminds me when, during mid-late 80s, I have written a small piece
of SF centered about "digital archeology".. briefly, the plot was around
the understanding and use of the humanist methods & tools (philology,
collation of editions, textual criticism &c.) by technically-minded
people (I'm actually a sort of polymath more humanist than sci/tech...)
I guess that this shows how I'm feeling now..
They also had two hardware modes installed on the machine which allow it
to execute PDP-9 and bank-mode PDP-15 code, and used the PDP-9/15 operating
system, rather than DECsys-7, for most of the system's history. I'm not
sure that SimH can handle their code without some changes--we'll have to
see once I can begin imaging tapes.
Meh, this is an interesting issue in hardware restoration: this specific
-7 is the lone surviving -7, and there is the decision of keeping it in
its original condition (that is, "standard" PDP-7) or in his actual
working configuration. Is an issue I know well (my main interest in
History are Warships and Naval technology) because many discussion
and/or disagreement is if the ship should be restored to the, say, how
was when first commissioning or how was after peacetime/wartime
modernizations....
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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