[Simh] RSTS/E 9.5

[Tim Shoppa]

Brett Bump <bbump at rsts.org> wrote:
> A howto and distribution kit would be great and we would be willing to
> host your work if you would like.  I doubt that you would be stepping on
> anyones toes.  Tim put years of work into handholding Mentec to get them
> to go as far as they did, only to have most of it all disolve in front
> of him.

To be honest, I kind-of lost interest circa 2001 myself.

The hassles were legal ones and I cannot really blame the folks on
the Mentec side for running out of steam to deal with those issues
either.

The good news is that there is a license for RSTS, RSX, and RT-11 under
SIMH, along with the layered products, and we will all assume that
this can continue on in perpetuity.

> Kirk and I put the web site on hold for years hoping everything
> would work out better than it did, but my last contact at Mentec quit
> emailing years ago.

The good news is that between me and Terry Kennedy and others and
you too Brett, is that much of the RSTS stuff is available for
SIMH on the 'net. e.g. ftp://ftp.trailing-edge.com/pub/rsts_dists/
There you'll find some bz2'd tap files, as well as some zipped
tpc files (which anyone will probably want to reformat to tap
format with mtcvtv23 (or whatever the latest version is).

> We have still been looking for old versions from V5A to V6C.  The V6C we
> have up includes all of the distribution, but the INIT.SYS is corrupt.
>
> I would also welcome anyone who would like to post their RSTS hobby work
> online for others to learn from, and to invite you to contribute any
> knowledge you may remember to the Wikipedia RSTS/E article that Paul
> Koning and I have been trying to expand.  Most likely I will replicate
> the Wikipedia information locally so that it can be expanded beyond what
> Wikipedia is willing to tolerate.

While I said my interest pooped out in 2001, I recently
have been re-invigorated by SIMH activity to put together some
easily hobbyist-bootable RT, RSX, and even RSTS disks where
the system and layered products don't have to be installed, but
are readily bootable and runnable, with some RSTS utilities
and (even better!) games thrown in for fun too. I would
like to work with you Brett (and whoever else is interested)
in getting this stuff together. For RSTS, most of my experience
is in the late V9/early V10 days, so I cannot really
help with V5A to V6C much but am willing to give it a try :-).

Even though I've had a bunch of RSTS DECUS stuff I've never
organized it well. I was very happy to find a bunch of the
early DECUS paper tapes but there's much more stuff for me to do!
After a couple of years away this is sounding more like fun
again!

I went through a very long phase of "Oh no, computers are work
not fun" and am beginning to realize that SIMH is pure fun, not
work at all!

Tim.