TUHS November 2001

tuhs@tuhs.org

19 participants
23 discussions

by SHOPPA＠trailing-edge.com

>we are looking for someone with access to a working 8" DSDD floppy >disk drive, presumably running RT or RSX on the PDP system. This is >to retrieve some very interesting historic material regarding the >Internet. As some of you may know, the IMP's in the 1980s, or fuzzball >systems, were running PDPs. You need more than just the drive - you need a compatible controller. While most floppy systems were DEC-compatible in SSSD and SSDD modes (RX01 and RX02), the DEC RX03 (DSDD) was never released and as a result there are literally dozens of not-quite-compatible DSDD floppy systems. When the low-level format agrees, you'll discover that the interleaving doesn't! (And there are a lot more choices with regards to interleaving when you've got two sides...) If you can clue us in as to the make and model of the writing controller, it'd help a lot. >The actual floppies to be read are in Delaware, anyone close there >would be a big bonus. I'm sure I've got a couple dozen not-quite-compatible DSDD systems here in DC :-). Tim.

23 years, 1 month

[pups] Searching for 8" DSDD drive

by Joerg Micheel

Hi PDP owners, we are looking for someone with access to a working 8" DSDD floppy disk drive, presumably running RT or RSX on the PDP system. This is to retrieve some very interesting historic material regarding the Internet. As some of you may know, the IMP's in the 1980s, or fuzzball systems, were running PDPs. The actual floppies to be read are in Delaware, anyone close there would be a big bonus. Thank you. Joerg -- Joerg B. Micheel Email: <joerg(a)cs.waikato.ac.nz> WAND and NLANR MOAT Email: <joerg(a)nlanr.net> The University of Waikato, CompScience Phone: +64 7 8384794 Private Bag 3105 Fax: +64 7 8585095 Hamilton, New Zealand Plan: PMA, TINE and the DAG's

23 years, 1 month

[pups] Trouble with 2.11BSD and CQD-220

by Chuck Dickman

I have a QBus SCSI disk controller (Horray!) and it is working fine. Except... I cannot get it to boot directly from the SCSI drive. More detail.... The processor is an 11/73 and the SCSI controller is a CMD CQD-220 with a Fujitsu 220MB drive. The CQD-220 is set as the primary MSCP controller and an RQDX3 with an RX50 drive as the secondary MSCP controller. I have placed rauboot from 2.11BSD on the SCSI drive and on a floppy. I can boot fine from the floppy, but not from the SCSI drive. The floppy loads boot and then from there .: ra(0,0,0)unix boots unix from the SCSI drive. When booting from the SCSI drive, the boot sector is loaded into memory and then relocated. It hangs waiting for the MSCP controller to respond. I have not diagnosed it to the command that hangs. Is anybody else booting 2.11BSD directly from a drive attached to a CQD-220? -chuck

23 years, 1 month

[pups] Re: PUPS digest, Vol 1 #5 - 3 msgs

by Jay Jaeger

Bill Gunshannon wrote: > What are the odds that a 15 year old tape is even readable today?? I know > when I found the original BSD tapes here even with their being stored in the > computer room, they were unreadable. You might be surprised. PUPS has Mini-Unix because I was able to read a 15 year old tape a few years back. I can still read a copy of the V6 distribution that was made in the late 1970's. Recently I read thru all the 9 track tapes I had, and only one of them had errors. Many were well over 10 years old. And Paul Pierce managed to put together a usable image of the IBM PR155 O/S for the IBM 1410 by reading 2 7 track tapes that were pushing 30. Jay Jaeger --- Jay R. Jaeger The Computer Collection cube1(a)home.com visit http://members.home.net/thecomputercollection

23 years, 1 month

[pups] Scanning old Unix manuals in

by Warren Toomey

In article by martin lovick: > Hi, > > I've read the FAQ and it mentioned the earlier versions of the [Unix manuals] > being scanned and ocr'd..... Has any progress been made with this? > > regards > Martin Lovick Well, both Norman and I were going to do it. Because Dennis found the 3rd and 4th Edition manuals in electronic format, now we are only missing the 2nd and 5th Edition manuals. I made an abortive start before I left my job in July, and I haven't got back to it. So, no real progress at this stage. Warren

23 years, 1 month

Re: [pups] The Software Tools Virtual Operating System

by Bill Gunshannon

On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, David C. Jenner wrote: > Bill, > > I can assure you that what you were pointed to at the Ken Yap's Links > is what you are seeking. It may not be the final version, but it is > essentially what I received on a tape 20 years ago. There's even some > later material circa 1983, which postdated what I had, in the "Toys" file. Hmmmm. I'm beginning to think as it neared the end and interest trailed off much of the work did not get rolled back in to the base distribution. My last experience was around 84-85 and it was a package from GA Tech that ranon the Prime 50 series minis. It was alot like using Eunice on a VAX/VMS system. A quick scan of the stuff from Ken Yap found no mention of a number of systems that were known to exist by that time. No PDP-11, no Prime, some mention of the VAX, no mention of Unix (don't ask me why, but the VOS was ported to Unix!!). I guess what I need to do is see what systems are supported in what I have and try to get a system up again to check out. > > I probably still have the tape, but, it's 20 years old, hasn't been > used for at least 15 years, who knows what condition it's in, and it's > not much different than the content on the Web. What are the odds that a 15 year old tape is even readable today?? I know when I found the original BSD tapes here even with their being stored in the computer room, they were unreadable. > > You must realize, I guess, that you aren't getting a complete operating > system when you speak of STVOS, but just a ratfor translator and sources > for lots of Unix-like utilities. And primitives to translate between the host OS and the VOS API. > You need to supply a Fortran compiler > and operating system on which to build this. And many were supported. I was hoping to find enough of them to have a good example of what problems were run into doing the ports. Can go a long way in helping with other porting efforts. And because the API is very Unix-like it offers some intersting possibilities for expansion. > The idea was to make a > highly-portable set of software development tools and utilities that > could be ported and used across many OSes, thus making what you develop > available across many OSes. There is no OS (i.e., resource management, > file system, etc.) included. True. But a common API with hooks into a number of very different OSes. > > What you refer to in your emails about VOS bears little resemblance > to the STVOS, because STVOS wasn't an OS. Probably depends on your definition of OS. It was an ambitious project at the time and an idea whose time may just now be coming into vogue. > Today's VOSes, like a Java > machine, are at least one step beyond the STVOS. Again, I am not sure I agree. To me the Java VM is just the UCSD P-machine warmed over. One of the reasons things like the P-Machine and VOSes didn't fly 20 years ago was performance. We were trying to wring every last bit (no pun intended!) of performance out of our hardware. We frequently still did a lot of our programming in assembler (I was doing things like Prime 50-series and Univac-1100 assembler and almost anything on a micro was either complete or heavily laced with assembler, LSI-11, Z80, M68K.) Today, for all intents and purposes we have cpu cycles to burn. Look at the popularity of hardware emulators. E11, Charon VAX, SIMH. And people talking about how these emulators outperform the real hardware and could easily be used as production systems. Maybe it's time to look into reviving some of these ideas, but hopefully, not with a return to the beginning and a total re- invention of the wheel. > > You might want to establish what the final date of release of STVOS > was to determine what the final version was. As I recall, it wasn't > too much later than 1981. (The Toys tape is 1983.) Somewhere I have > a pile of old newsletters that would have the answer, but they're > boxed away in storage. I won't be able to dig for them for another > month. I know the Prime version was still available until the mid 80's. but much of this may have been independant work as STUG may have already faded into the background. I guess the thing that bothers me the most is not wether or not this can be turned into something usable, but the fact that what was an impressive work for the time it was done has been allowed to all but disappear. Maybe I'm getting maudlin in my old age. :-) I appreciate everyone's help and as I said previously, it makes me appreciate even more the work of Warren and PUPS and Tim Shoppa as well. All the best. bill -- Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves bill(a)cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. University of Scranton | Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>

23 years, 1 month

Re: [pups] The Software Tools Virtual Operating System

by SHOPPA＠trailing-edge.com

>> ftp://ftp.trailing-edge.com/pub/rsx11freewarev2/rsx81a/ > Thanks for the pointer. I was aware of the RSX version that was contained >in the DECUS library. But there really was quite a bit more to the whole >distribution than that. Can you educate us about what is missing? If you can clue me in as to a specific file name or a specific text string that might be in a missing file, I'll gladly search through the few tens of gigabytes of images I've got here. Tim.

23 years, 1 month

RE: [TUHS] Disk Drivers

by Ian King

I can speak to the v6 stuff, and I think the same applies to the v7 stuff: the bootable image rkunix is intended to allow you to get a system booted from an RK05 (on which you've presumably installed this image), so that you can rebuild the system to suit your hardware. There is some special stuff in v6 for the PDP-40, so presumably the rkunix.40 image addresses that. The 'unix' image is the image one customarily boots to use the system; it's probably the image from the system on which the image was originally built all those years ago, and is intended to be replaced by your new image. Presumably, the drivers in that image might be identified if the c.c and l.c files are still present in /usr/sys. I don't know whether Bob Supnik actually built these images, or (as I suspect) included them from e.g. the PUPS site. Regarding the v7 stuff, I think you'll find considerable information in the v7 setup docs on the PUPS website, as to which corresponds to what drives (although it's somewhat self-explanatory). Hope that's helpful -- Ian -----Original Message----- From: Matthew Whitehead [mailto:matthew.whitehead@apple.com] Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 12:59 PM To: TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org Subject: [TUHS] Disk Drivers I'm getting a tad frustrated with the otherwise excellent Supnik PDP-11 emulators. Can anyone tell me (or give me the adb commands to figure it out myself) what disk device drivers are present in the bootable disk images that come with the Supnik simulator? The versions I'm interested are: V6 image: - rkunix (rk) - rkunix.40 (rk, PDP-11/40 cpu?) - unix V7 image: - hphtunix (hp) - hptmunix (hp) - rkunix (rk) - rl2unix (obviously hacked to include rl driver) - rphtunix (rp) - rptmunix (rp) Matthew (mrw(a)apple.com) _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org http://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs

23 years, 1 month

[pups] [TUHS] Disk Drivers (fwd)

by Warren Toomey

[Forwarded to the PUPS list, as this is PDP-11 specific - Warren] Your best bets are: - Use nm on the kernel if it hasn't been stripped - Or go to /usr/sys/conf if you have the sources, and look at the config files for each kernel, e.g rptmunix came from rptmconf, which has: rp root rp 1 swap rp 2 swplo 0 nswap 2000 tm Cheers, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Matthew Whitehead ----- From: Matthew Whitehead <matthew.whitehead(a)apple.com> Subject: [TUHS] Disk Drivers Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 12:58:54 -0800 I'm getting a tad frustrated with the otherwise excellent Supnik PDP-11 emulators. Can anyone tell me (or give me the adb commands to figure it out myself) what disk device drivers are present in the bootable disk images that come with the Supnik simulator? The versions I'm interested are: V6 image: - rkunix (rk) - rkunix.40 (rk, PDP-11/40 cpu?) - unix V7 image: - hphtunix (hp) - hptmunix (hp) - rkunix (rk) - rl2unix (obviously hacked to include rl driver) - rphtunix (rp) - rptmunix (rp) Matthew (mrw(a)apple.com) ----- End of forwarded message from Matthew Whitehead -----

23 years, 1 month

Disk Drivers

by Matthew Whitehead

I'm getting a tad frustrated with the otherwise excellent Supnik PDP-11 emulators. Can anyone tell me (or give me the adb commands to figure it out myself) what disk device drivers are present in the bootable disk images that come with the Supnik simulator? The versions I'm interested are: V6 image: - rkunix (rk) - rkunix.40 (rk, PDP-11/40 cpu?) - unix V7 image: - hphtunix (hp) - hptmunix (hp) - rkunix (rk) - rl2unix (obviously hacked to include rl driver) - rphtunix (rp) - rptmunix (rp) Matthew (mrw(a)apple.com)

23 years, 1 month

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TUHS November 2001