[Simh] Way out idea for simh

[Kevin Handy]

I think you are trying to over-engineer this file transfer stuff.

Instead of creating new devices for the transfer to operate over, why not
use something that already exists on most of the simulators, like a serial
port.
 Instead of building all this code into simh to convert from one disk file
 format to another. inside the simulator, use a progrm attached to the
serial port which handles the hosts file access. You will still need a
program on the simulated system to handle it's side of the transfers. W can
give the whole setup a common name, like "kermit".

Most of this stream just seems to me to re-inenting Kermit in one way or
another. It might be fun/interesting but doesn't seem to gain anything
beyond what Kermit already does.

All this stuff has been hashed over many times when the hardware was
actually in use, and solutions were devised then to handle the
numerous problems. Creating new interfaces, new instructions, etc. and
modifying OS's just to re-implement kermit in another way seems to be a lot
of overkill to me., but most of these messages seem to have no advantages
to just using existing kermit capabilities.

If you want shares access the host filesystem, look to 'nfs'. If the
emulated system doesn't already have shared filesystem already, you are
probably going to be fighting such things as the disk caching code. File
system corruption is very likely to occur.

A lot of the simulated OS's have more basic problems that just making the
raw data available to the host OS. VMS doesn't store anything, including
text files, in a "stream of byte" form. Others have 6 or 9-bit bytes. Then
there is ASCII (multiple variants) EBCDIC (multiple variants), BAUDOUT, etc.

I think it would be more advantageous to write disk image manipulation
routines to insert/extract files to the simulated disk images (while
simulator is not running).


On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 1:14 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> > On Apr 20, 2016, at 3:08 PM, skyvis at sky-visions.com wrote:
> >
> > OS's don't support foreign file systems. What they do is provide the
> ability to access a drive that does not have what they believe to be a
> valid file system.
>
> Not necessarily.  RSTS does in the latest versions, but not in early
> versions.  For example, RSTS V4A has no raw disk API, and gives you no
> access to any disk except via the RSTS file system.  The same goes for some
> other operating systems; I don't know of raw disk access on CDC NOS either,
> for example.  (Well, not unless you write a PPU program; if you don't mind
> doing that, the job is easy.)
>
>         paul
>
>
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