[Simh] 3.8-0 released

[J. David Bryan]

On Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 8:44, Ken Cornetet wrote:

> It appears from the change log that perhaps RTE-6 is now officially
> supported on the 21MX emulation. Is this correct? 

Yes.


> Is there anyone on the list running RTE-6? 

Yes.


> Are there disk images available?

Ay, there's the rub.

Ever since the Computer History Museum obtained a license to and copies of 
the HP software and manuals last year, with explicit rights to redistribute 
to third parties, Al Kossow and I have been working hard to make these 
materials available.  We thought that we were pretty close last month to 
getting everything properly sublicensed and up on trailing-edge.com, but 
then it fell through.

The problem is that CHM appears to prioritize sublicensing of the HP 
materials very low among their activities.  We must be properly sublicensed 
by the CHM in order to provide the materials legally, and were we to 
provide them without the proper sublicense in place, HP would have the 
right to demand the return of all of their software from the CHM, to cancel 
the license, and then in all likelihood the materials would be shredded by 
HP.  We really don't want that to happen, as then everything would be lost 
irretrievably.

So we're somewhat stuck at this point.  Al continues to work within the CHM 
to get things rolling again, but there appears to be a fair amount of 
bureaucratic inertia to overcome.  Perhaps writing a (polite) note to the 
CHM via Al would help him make our case to the museum management.


> I noticed that the one of the software archive sites has a tape image
> of a few RTE-6 primaries in PSAVE format. Does anyone know how to
> build a disk image from one of these primaries?

You need the RTE offline backup/restore tape, which may be booted and used 
to restore the PSAVE tape to a disc.  That's now available from Bitsavers:

  http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/HP/tapes/rte-6vm/

The file is "92084-16736_Rev-6200.abin.tape" and there's also a SIMH 
command file ("BCKOF.sim") that can be used to boot the tape to perform the 
restore.

There are some comments in the .sim file.  I'll see about getting a more 
complete writeup of the restoration process and the subsequent RTE boot to 
Al in the next day or so for posting at the above URL.

                                      -- Dave