On Mon, 27 Apr 2015, Rich Alderson wrote:
I can't speak to ITS at the moment, those bits are buried deep under more
current projects, of which the most relevant is WAITS on a 1095 here at the
museum.
I am very inteested in WAITS; didn't it require custom hardware though?
SU-AI[1] only had 3Mbit Experimental Ethernet, courtesy of a Xerox interface
card for the PDP-11. This was installed into the 11/40 front end on the KL[2]
in order to talk a batch of Altos donated by Xerox at the same time. This only
ever spoke PUP.[3]
Huh. Was the VAX one similar?
WAITS, which began as the PDP-6 monitor and diverged from Tops-10 around the
time of the 4S72 monitor, supported NCP until TCP/IP came along, at which point
the lab made a clean break from NCP. There was never any Ethernet-related code
underlying the NCP or IP protocol stacks.
Interesting.
I'm currently working on getting networking going on WAITS. I have a console-
only system running, since late last fall. It was only a month ago that one of
the SAIL alumni advising this project pointed out that WAITS never used the
MEIS (or any other Ethernet interface) for TCP/IP. We're trying to get a Xerox
card for the front end, since we have Altos anyway, and to figure out how we're
going to put this on the Internet.
Can I get a disk/tape image? ;)
Easier asking you than rudely mass-downloading from SAILDART and
attempting to assemble an FS...
How's your ... 1065? running TOPS-10 connected? Bridge from a terminal
server?
Years before Digital brought out the NIA-20, there was a successful commercial
product, the Massbus-Ethernet Interface Subsystem (MEIS), from Cisco. This was
a 10Mbit ("10base5", in modern parlance) version of a 3Mbit board set invented
at Stanford for the purpose of networking the various PDP-10 sites on campus
together.[4] The Stanford monitor (ancestor of the Panda monitor of which so
many people are fond) supported TCP/IP as well as PUP over the MEIS, both 3Mbit
and 10Mbit; Cisco and Mark Crispin separately decided to remove the PUP code
from their monitors.[5]
I have all of the Stanford patches for that sitting on a Panda install,
interestingly enough. I also have something lsited as an MIT and BBN
monitor.
[4] In 1984 when I went to work at Stanford's academic computing facility LOTS
there were more than a dozen systems running TOPS-20 or TENEX on campus:
LOTS had 4, CompSci had 2 (SCORE and SAIL), EE had 2 (Sierra and one I don't
remember the name of), the Center for the Study of Language and Information
had 1 or 2 (CSLI and another), the Medical School had 2 (SUMEX, a KL, and a
KS whose name I do not remember), the Graduate School of Business had 2 (HOW
and WHY), the Data Center had 1 (ConTEXT, IIRC), and the Institute for
Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences had a dual-processor KI (IMSSS,
running TENEX).
Do you have a pure TENEX system running? I've always wanted to poke
around in pure TENEX.
[5] All of Cisco's business and engineering was done on DEC-20 systems for the
first half dozen years or so.
Interesting, originals or TOADs?
Also: for the LCM SC-40s: The SCSI controller chip can do either HVD or
SE, from what I've been told and from my own invstigations...it can be
changed by swapping a small daughterboard which doesn't seem to be more
than some resistor packs and some line drivers. Could more easily use
say, SCSI2SD on those, that way.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
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