[Simh] Problem with reading tape with PDP-11 SIMH

[Timothe Litt]

In general, I agree.    The problem is not that someone should document
things, but that a specific someone has to make the time available and
do it... A volunteer community doesn't automagically do things.

I believe GitHub allows setting up a wiki - if someone cares to manage it.

In this case I believe that the plan is to update the default delay so that
TPC will work with SimH out of the box.

This communication may not represent my employer's views,
if any, on the matters discussed. 

On 22-May-15 10:43, Armistead, Jason BIS wrote:
> So now that Alan has TPC working, where and how do we document all this, i.e. the symptoms, the underlying SIMH design & behavior vs the expected RSX behavior that cause it to manifest itself as a problem, and the DEP TS TIME solution, in an easy-to-find way so the next person doesn't have to go through this pain ?
>
> There is an awful lot of collective wisdom from the contributors to this e-mail list, but unless someone diligently searches the mailing list archives and gets lucky, it's not easy for a user to solve their own problem, even if it's been seen several times previously.
>
> The SIMH FAQ on the trailing edge web site (in PDF) has not been updated in 3 years, and the DOC version on GitHub was last updated a little over 2 years ago, and I wonder whether a better "living" form of documentation like a Wiki would be a more useful solution. i.e. when a system-specific usage-related problem is discovered (and hopefully fixed), the cause, effect and solution is distilled into an appropriate new or existing Wiki page.
>
> As I read the e-mails on this list, I am in constant awe at the depth of knowledge that many contributors have - in this particular case Mark and Timothe did the heavy lifting to help Alan, but there are many others whose first-hand experience "back in the day" drives SIMH user problems to a solution.  How do we preserve everyone's legacy of product knowledge for future generations who will use SIMH long after they are gone ?  To me it's as important as preserving the knowledge of the hardware SIMH simulates.
>
> Jason
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simh [mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Alan Frisbie
> Sent: Thursday, 21 May 2015 8:16 PM
> To: Mark at infocomm.com
> Cc: SIMH at trailing-edge.com
> Subject:  Re: [Simh] Problem with reading tape with PDP-11 SIMH
>
> Mark,
>
>> Please follow Timothe Litt's suggestion and get back to me with the 
>> minimal value of DEP TS TIME which produces reasonable results for the 
>> original TPC problem you saw.
> Here are the results:
>
> 5000 - TPC works fine
> 2500 - TPC works fine
> 1800 - TPC works fine
> 1500 - TPC works fine, RSX reported tape drive errors
> 1350 - TPC works fine, RSX reported tape drive errors
> 1200 - TPC hangs
> 0    - TPC hangs
>
> To be safe, I think I'll use 2000 from now on when using TPC.
>
> Thanks a lot for all the help.   It saved me a lot of
> debugging and head scratching.
>
> Alan Frisbie
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