[Simh] RSTS/E 9.5

[Brett Bump]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008, Tim Shoppa wrote:

> 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.

Yes, and I think Terry, Tim and myself are willing to do what we can to
keep the knowledge of RSTS alive, and with Bob's help, this makes running
it without the "real" hardware, possible. ;-)

> 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).

Thanks Tim. ;-)  I wasn't going to give out your web site addresses with
out your prior consent.  Terry provided me with lots of inspiration during
the 80s and we spent many a Midnight-4am phone session discussing how to
make RSTS a better OS to work with.  It was with Tim's help that I finally
decided to keep the RSTS.ORG site alive and hoped to see it active.

> 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 :-).

Thanks Tim.  I haven't talked with Megan in quite a while but if someone
could get her involved I know she has a V4B (V4B is a patched V4A system)
distributioin that would be a nice addition to the archives.  Ashley, I
know your out there (struggling with a V6A distribution), if anyone of us
can be of help, let us know (I never did figure out DECtape).

It's possible that John (EG&H) still has some early distributions that he
might be able to dig up, I know he did a lot of work on the V6.x versions.

I like the idea of seeing RSTS active again with hobbyist and debated if
there was a reason to generate a canned (bootable/fully/configured) OS.  I
haven't done anything with my CUSTOM/E software package in over 20 years
but would be willing to add that to the mix as well. ;-)

> 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.
>

I ran into that about a decade ago building Citrix farms. lol  I've found
the more time I spend away from Windows the better my abilty to relax and
enjoy the computers I work with. ;-)

Brett