Il 21/03/2013 14:55, Armistead, Jason ha scritto:
There has been a lot of interesting discussion about tape drives on
PDP systems in the last week or so. It's great to hear those
familiar with the inner workings of these devices, or with access to
the manuals, share their wisdom.
One question though - after the "old timers" are gone, would a newbie
to SIMH be able to figure these same things out ?
Or, in other words, do the accompanying comments in the code and the
SIMH documentation adequately capture the "nuggets" of the
conversations that take place on this list ? And do we provide
enough in the way of "breadcrumbs" to allow a newbie to re-discover
this same information ?
Capturing this knowledge is a hard thing to do, and with
retrocomputing we are presently at a point in time where we can still
rely on folks who designed, built, tested, operated and programmed
these systems, and in some cases they still even have running systems
available for experimentation and measurement. But what happens when
that is no longer the case ?
Just food for thought ... let's make sure SIMH and its fellow
emulators like MAME / MESS can still be enjoyed and understood by
future generations.
I have reported, and was discussed here, the issues with PDP-4/7 DECsys,
whose is rooted in the partial emulation of the DECTape formatting; In
more recent time, I have haved little time to fool with SIMH, so I guess
that a .txt or .odt shared "Notebook of SIMH" can be a good idea.
oh, and about the issues with ex and de, e.g. Librascope emulation ?
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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