[Simh] RTS/8 and DECnet

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-03-15 04:41, Ethan Dicks wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 11:30 PM, Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
>>    I just skimmed the manual, but it looks like DECnet-8 was really limited.  It's basically a toolkit for writing your own applications that talk via DECnet; the only standard applications supplied are TLK and LSN (sort of the PDP-8 equivalent to PHONE).  There's no FAL, NFT or RMT task.  It doesn't seem like there's much you can do with it unless you want to write a bunch of software first.
>>
>>    Or is there something I'm missing?
>
> I think you pretty much have it there.  It was really limited.

Yeah. I've read through the code, and that's about it. You have the 
basic services so that you can write your own programs that communicate 
over DECnet, but there are very few standard programs supplied. I wonder 
if TLK/LSN might actually be compatible with the ones under RSX. Quite 
possible.
But there is not much else. But that not so unlike RTS/8 itself. RTS/8 
is not really much of a generic OS. You build it, along with the tasks 
that you want to run, from sources, and then you run the whole thing. 
There is no way of adding and removing tasks in an existing system. It 
is rather static.
The best it can offer is that you can have OS/8 as a background task in 
there, so that you can run random generic programs in that environment.

I don't remember who I talk to, but it might have been Paul, but it 
appears DECnet-8 is pretty much Phase I, from what we figured out. Maybe 
DEC wrote some newer version that have not been found, since 
documentation and SPDs mention Phase II.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
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