[Simh] EXT :Re: PDP-10 simulation: DEUNA support help needed

[Rich Alderson]

> Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2015 21:56:07 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net>

> 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?

I suppose you're thinking of the Data Disc terminals, which connected to the
system through a giant disk (a Librascope, if I have my facts straight).  The
system wrote on the disk, the terminal displayed that content, keyboard wrote
on the disk, system acted on the input.

These were the terminals which gave the Space Cadet keyboard on the MIT LispMs
their bucky bits[1] and TeX many of its interesting characters in the low ASCII
range ("ASCII control characters").

>> 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?

Further deponent sayeth not.[2]

>> 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...

You would still have to assemble a file system by hand.  WAITS originated
before DEC's Level D disk code, and the systems programmers defined their own
file system.  PPNs are SIXBIT, so [1,2] is octal 21,,22 in the MFD entry (yes,
they're right justified in the halfwords).  The last version of the file
system, which lived on 3 RP07 disks, allocated things in blocks of 9 sectors,
giving 1K of data + 200 words of "retrieval data" per block (repeated through
every block of a file).

The issue is that only 3 systems ran WAITS: SU-AI at SAIL, a KL-10 system
attached to the S-1 project at Lawrence Livermore Labs, and a Foonly F2 at
CCRMA (the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, at Stanford).
Because of the way the system grew, there was never a need for a utility that
would build a file system from scratch on an initialized disk (like CHECKD in
TOPS-20 or the ONCE code in Tops-10, or even NSALV in ITS), so no one ever
wrote one.  The closest thing to it was a program written to move from a
damaged file system to a new set of RP07s, which relied on working copies of
several programs on the undamaged disks.

Getting a file system working was about 6 months of last year.

> How's your ... 1065? running TOPS-10 connected?  Bridge from a terminal 
> server?

2065.  It's in an orange corporate cabinet, and started life running TOPS-20.
We use it for Tops-10 (v7.04) because we have another platform for TOPS-20, one
on which it has all the memory it really needs.

>> 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]

Hmm.  I have to dig my personal tapes out of a storage locker.

> 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.

I assume that's what you listed in a later message.

>>    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.

Me, too.  TENEX requires either a KA-10 based system with a BBN pager attached,
or a KI-10 based system (and DEC would sell you a license for their modified
version).  If I ever have time, I might try getting TENEX to run on our 1070.

>> [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?

Originals, of course.  The Toad-1 System was introduced in 1995.  Cisco was
founded in 1984, with a business plan that called for building the Toad--all
the networking stuff was intended by the founders as a cash cow to fund the
development.

> 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.

Thanks, Cory!  I'll file that away.

                                                                Rich

[1] Interesting story about the name, recounted in John Markoff's book _What
    the Dormouse Said_.

[2] I honestly don't know.