[Simh] Klh10 vs Simh

[Rich Alderson]

> Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2016 13:48:48 -0500
> From: Michael Kerpan <mjkerpan at kerpan.com>

> I've been hoping for a KL simulation in SIMH for a while. KLH10 lacks
> support for things like serial over Telnet which means that multiuser
> is essentially impossible on KLH10 without all kinds of networking
> mojo. Sadly, I don't have the skill to actually write such a beast,
> I'm of no use except as a data point regarding interest in such a
> development.

I don't understand what you're trying to say.  Multiuser klh10 is as simple as
configuring the Ethernet interface (which, admittedly, is the bletcherous NIA20
rather than the Stanford/Cisco MEIS) and telnetting in.

There is, in fact, a publicly accessible klh10 running at twenex.org.

Serial line interfaces were on their way out by 1990; XKL (who bought the
36-bit IP from Digital) never offered a serial line interface on their products
(leaving aside the console port as a special case).  Ken came to visit us once,
and he and I talked about a Toad-1 variant of klh10 (although XKL management
was against it, so it never happened).

Most of the work on klh10 v2 after Ken's initial release was done by the late
Mark Crispin, who also created a packaged release of TOPS-20 v7.1 (the Panda
distribution).  I was supposed to help his family break into the Linux box
running klh10 (lingling.panda.com), but allowed other commitments to get in the
way, so there has been no further development since 2011.

Neither MRC nor the XKL team had any use for DECnet, so both the Panda monitor
and the XKL monitor are TCP/IP-only (as $DEITY intended :-).

                                                                Rich