[Simh] Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities source code

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
And I remember trying out an extension to iRMX-86 which would work
with MS Windows 3.11. (Or Windows 3.0) It was an interesting idea, but
I never got it to go anywhere.

It would be interesting to track down the whole business.....
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 1:27 PM, Quentin North <quentin at quentin.org.uk> wrote:
> I remember using iRMX-86 which was a realtime os environment and from memory
> had a ucsd like menu based user interface along with PLM-86 as the main
> programming language. We used it for building flight simulator visual
> systems.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 22 Feb 2016, at 15:31, Armistead, Jason BIS <Jason.Armistead at otis.com>
> wrote:
>
> Sorry for this off-topic posting, but with all the recent talk about Intel’s
> history of x86 development, I was wondering whether there are any “Intel
> connected” people around here who might know what happened to the source
> code for Intel’s PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities (LINK86, LOC86, LIB86,
> CREF86 and OH86).  The manuals for many of these are on Bitsavers.
>
> I have used both the DOS-hosted and VAX/VMS hosted versions of these tools,
> but when Y2K was approaching I reached out to Intel to see if we could
> obtain the source code under some sort of license (given that these products
> weren’t being sold anymore) that would allow us to modify it for Y2K just to
> tidy up the generated compiler listing files, linker map files, etc., which
> were the only real place dates and times were used.  The reply I got from
> Intel was basically stating that this was “lost” and no-one knew what became
> of it.  And now, with the switch to x64, Windows 7.x and later Windows
> incarnations no longer support running the old 16-bit DOS executables in a
> 64-bit environment, other than resorting to virtually hosted DOS using
> DOSbox, VirtualBox or similar.
>
> PL/M-86 was never (to my knowledge) used to build a widely-used operating
> system in the way its predecessor PL/M-80 was used to build the early CP/M
> 1.x and 2.0, so it never quite got as much attention as  “piece of computing
> history”.
>
> We also used PL/M-80 under ISIS-II on Intel’s iPDS and MDS-80 development
> workstations, PL/M-80 under iSIM85 ISIS-II emulator on DOS/Windows
> 16/32-bit, as well as PL/M-51 under DOS/Windows 16/32-bit.  There were also
> PL/M-286 and PL/M-386 varieties, and possibly PL/M-48 (?) though I never
> personally used them.
>
> Interestingly, I just discovered that there was a PL/M-VAX version (see
> http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html ) that was written in Fortran and emits
> VAX instructions.  From looking at that source it looks like that was
> something done by National Energy Software Center at the Argonne National
> Laboratory using Intel code from 1981 as a starting point.
>
> I probably should have thought of asking on the SIMH e-mail list years ago !
> Perhaps someone on this list has connections at Intel (or used to work
> there) and maybe this source code really does exist in either the corporate
> archives or in some private or museum collection.
>
> Cheers
> Jason A.
>
>
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