[Simh] Is it possible to simulate the first Vaxen I ever used?

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 9:33 AM Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:

>   The 730 was interesting in that ALL of the CPU microcode was in RAM and
> was loaded by the CFE at boot time.  It was possible to locally modify the
> 730 microcode, and DEC even had a set of microcode development tools for
> the 730.


One of my favorite underground engineering stories.

Masscomp forked from DEC and number the folks on the HW and microcode teams
that had worked on the 750/730 ended up Masscomp.  They wanted that set
same set of tools, but it required VMS which were did not have (and we were
not going to run in our 750 and were in BLISS of course).   As a compromise
to the HW team, a couple of us (Terry Hayes, tjt and I IIRC) got a manual
for those tools and with some oral directions from Dick Monroe and some of
the other microcode guys, using awk/lex/yacc *et al* - we cons'ed up a
replacement fairly quickly, of course, running on our 750/BSD and then
later self-hosted on the Masscomps running RTU.

Around the same time, Widdoes *et al* spun SCALD CAD tools out of Livermore
and Stanford creating Valid Logic design (which was a UNIX flavor under the
covers).   Both DEC West in particular and Masscomp started to use Valid
boxes for HW support.   DEC West had written a bunch of macros and tools
that made the Valid easier to use. And our HW guys knew about them.  DEC
West had heard we had new versions of the DEC tools in C and on UNIX.

So one night the Maui Kia parking lot (this is now Yankzee River in
Littleton), a tape swap was arranged.   We gave them our Unix based version
of the microcode tools and we got their additions/updates to Valid.
Management of neither company never knew the difference.

FWIW: I went looking for the tapes of both a couple of years ago, and sadly
I can not find either.  But its one my keep looking list when I get around
to cataloging some of the old SW from those days.

Clem
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