TUHS

tuhs@tuhs.org

47 participants
6504 discussions

Re: [TUHS] UNIBUS issues (Was: Spacewar at Bell Labs)

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> > [ Getting into COFF territory, I think ] I'm sending this reply to TUHS since the message I'm replying to has some errors, and I'd like for the corrections to be in the record close by. > On Thu, 30 Jan 2020, Clem Cole wrote: >> They way they tried to control it was to license the bus interface chips >> (made privately by Western Digital for them IIRC but were not available >> on the open market). Although DEC did have some custom chips for QBUS interfacing, they didn't always use them (below). And for the UNIBUS, the chips were always, AFAIK, open market (and the earliest ones may have predated the UNIBUS). E.g. the M105 Address Selector, a single-width FLIP CHIP, used in the earliest PDP-11's when devices such as the RK11-C, RP11 and TM11 were made out of a mass of small FLIP CHIPS, used SP380A's for its bus receivers and 8881's for transmitters. On the QBUS, the KDF11-A and KDJ11-A CPU cards used AMD 2908's as bus transceivers, even though DEC had its own custom chips. The KDF11-A also used DS8640's and DS8641's (transmitters and receivers), and also an 8881! (The UNIBUS and QBUS were effectively identical at the analog level, which is why a chip that historical was still in use.) >> If I recall it was the analog characteristics that were tricky with >> something like the BUS acquisition for DMA and Memory timing, but I >> admit I've forgotten the details. One _possibility_ for what he was talking about was that it took DEC a while to get a race/metastability issue with daisy-chained bus grant lines under control. (The issue is explained in some detail here: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Bus_Arbitration_on_the_Unibus_and_QBUS and linked pages.) This can been seen in the myriad of etch revisions for the M782 and related 'bus grant' FLIP CHIPs: https://gunkies.org/wiki/M782_Interrupt_Control By comparison, the M105 only had 3 through it's whole life! It wasn't until the M7821 etch D revision, which came out in 1977, almost a decade after the first PDP-11's appeared, that they seemed to have absorbed that the only 'solution' to the race/metastability issue involved adding delays. In all fairness, the entire field didn't really appreciate the metastability issue until the LINC guys at WUSTL did a big investigation of it, and then started a big campaign to educate everyone about it - it wasn't DEC being particularly clueless. > Hey, if the DEC marketoids didn't want 3rd-party UNIBUS implementations > then why was it published? Well, exactly - but it's useful to remember the differening situation for DEC from 1970 (first PDP-11's) and later. In 1970 DEC was mostly selling to scientists/engineers, who wanted to hook up to some lab equipment they'd built, and OEM's, who often wanted to use a mini to control some value-added gear of their own devising. An open bus was really necessary for those markets. Which is why the 1970 PDP-11/20 manual goes into a lot of detail on how to interface to the PDP-11's UNIBUS. Later, of course, they were in a different business model. Noel

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Screen editors

by Jose R. Valverde

Talking of editors... Once I learned Wordstar in old CP/M (before that it was mostly line editing), and then soon, other editors that supported the Wordstar key combinations, I got hooked on those. Joe is, to date, one of my favorites. On ancient UNIX, my editor of choice was 's' from Software Tools, its main advantage being that it didn't require curses. Then we got VMS and 'eve' and that took over for a while (though I never took advantage of all its power), mostly until I ported 's' and 'joe'. Then came X, and when nedit was released, I was hooked on it. It has been for decades almost the only one that could do block selection 'a la' RAND editor. I have been struggling to continue using it despite it lack of support for UTF, trying various projects spun off nedit, until I recently discovered xnedit, which is an update available on GitHub and is again all I need, with support for UTF8, some minor UI improvements and support for modern fonts. Now, I still use 's' for ancient Unix emulators, 'joe' for the command line and 'xnedit' for X. j -- Scientific Computing Service Solving all your computer needs for Scientific Research. http://bioportal.cnb.csic.es

5 years, 3 months

Presotto paper

by Paul Ruizendaal

On the Nokia / Bell labs site I came across this publication: https://www.bell-labs.com/our-research/publications/234131/ <https://www.bell-labs.com/our-research/publications/234131/> Presotto D.: TCP/IP and Datakit - Two Views of Networking I’m not having much luck with finding out more about it. Does anybody recall this paper and where/when it might have been published?

5 years, 3 months

Atari System V media and books?

by Chris Hanson

I’ve seen the archives of Atari System V Release 4 for the TT030, and the scanned user and developer manuals. Has anything else been preserved, e.g. the installation tapes and any other manuals? Is there even a full accounting of what was in the box and what shipped afterwards (patches etc.)? -- Chris

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] System Call History

by Doug McIlroy

> Does anybody have or know of a list of system calls that describes > when and what version of UNIX (and descendents) they were added? Hardly a week goes by in which I don't refer to the attached condensed listing of all the man pages in v1-v9, taken from my "Research Unix Reader". It casts a much narrower net than Diomedes Spinelli's repository. but it takes no clicking to look thing up--just a quick grep. Doug

5 years, 3 months

System Call History

by Jon Steinhart

Does anybody have or know of a list of system calls that describes when and what version of UNIX (and descendents) they were added? Thanks, Jon

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

by Dave Horsfall

[ Getting into COFF territory, I think ] On Thu, 30 Jan 2020, Clem Cole wrote: > BTW: Dave story is fun, but I think a tad apocryphal. He's right that > DEC marketing was not happy about people using it, but it was well > spec'ed if you had CPU schematics. They way they tried to control it > was to license the bus interface chips (made privately by Western > Digital for them IIRC but were not available on the open market). IIRC > if you did not use DEC's chips, you could have issues if you >>similar<< > function chips from National Semi. I remember Ken O'Munhundro giving a > talk at a USENIX (while he was CEO of Able) talking about 'be careful > with foreign UNIBUS implementations.' If I recall it was the analog > characteristics that were tricky with something like the BUS acquisition > for DMA and Memory timing, but I admit I've forgotten the details. Ah; the chips could explain it. I can't remember where I heard the story, but it was likely in ";login:" or some place. Hey, if the DEC marketoids didn't want 3rd-party UNIBUS implementations then why was it published? > I think you are confusing VAX's SBI with UNIBUS. With the Vax, unlike > PDP-11, the systems did not come with complete schematics for all > boards. So to design for the SBI you had to reverse engineer the CPU > and Memory boards. DEC having successfully won the CalData suit, went > after Systems Industries who was the first to build SBI controllers. > DEC lost, but the truth was that because they had work had been reverse > engineering, SI was close but not 100% right and they had a number of > issues when the boards first hit the street, particularly with UNIX > which did a better job of overlapped I/O than VMS did. At UCB we had a > logic analyzer in one of the 780s at all times, and the phone number of > the SI engineers. We eventually helped them put out a couple ECO's > that make the original boards work in practice much better. No; it was definitely UNIBUS (I wasn't aware of the SBI at the time). As for overlapped seeks, when they were implemented in Unix it broke the RK-11 controller, and DEC pointed the finger at Unix (of course) since their own gear worked. To cut a long story short, they were forced to use some fancy diagnostic (DECEX?) which hammered everything at the same time, and the problem showed up. Turned out that their simpler diagnostics did not test for overlapped seeks, because they knew that it didn't work; out same the FE to modify the controller... > BTW: My friend Dave Cane lead the BI at DEC after finishing up the > VAX/750 project (he had designed the SBI for 780 before that). In > fact, the BI was >>supposed<< to be 'open' like Multibus and VME and all > chips were supposed to be from the merchant market. But at the last > minute, DEC marketing refused and locked down the specs/stopped shipping > schematics with the new systems destined to use BI. Dave was so pissed, > he left DEC to found Masscomp and design the MC500 (using the > Multibus). Yet another reason why DEC went under, I guess... -- Dave

5 years, 3 months

1984 AT&T Bell Labs Unix Edition

by Warner Losh

Greetings, Is this issue online? I may have a copy buried in my boxes of books, and am on the road. I'd like to read the article on portability and/or the one on performance. One of those has a table of internal vs external release names / dates. archive.org and elsewhere only has through 83. I discovered I might have it this morning 20 minutes before I had to leave for the airport for another talk. :( Thanks for any help you can provide.... Warner

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix quix

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Warner Losh > this predates everything except Whirlwind which I can't find a paper for. Given the 'Whirlwind is a ringer' comment, I asssume this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I< is what they mean. Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. Noel

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Spacewar at Bell Labs [ really paper tape readers and tangentially related things ]

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Clem Cole > So WD designs and builds a few LSI-11 as a sales demo of what you could > do > ... > he put it on the QBUS which DEC could not lock up because they did not > create it as WD had. Wow! WD created the QBUS? Fascinating. I wonder if DEC made any changes to the QBUS between the original demo WD boards and the first DEC ones? Are there any documents about the WD original still extant, do you know? (FWIW, it seems that whoever did the QBUS interrupt cycle had heard about the metastability issues when using a flop to do the grant-passing arbitrations; see here for more: https://gunkies.org/wiki/Bus_Arbitration_on_the_Unibus_and_QBUS#QBUS_Interr… DEC had previously bent themselves into knots trying to solve it on the UNIBUS: https://gunkies.org/wiki/M782_Interrupt_Control#Revisions so it would be interesting to know if it was WD or DEC who did the DIN thing to get rid of it on the QBUS.) Noel

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] man pages, defensive programming, and bibliographic

by Doug McIlroy

> Always use '\&' (a non-printing, zero width character) to > make it clear to the software, that the _function_ of the > character next to it, is neither a sentence-terminating nor > a control one. It is unfortunate that such advice has to be given. One should not have to defend against stupid AI. This is one of only two really unfortunate design choices (in my opinion) in original [nt]roff. (The other is beginning a new page when the vertical position reaches--as distinct from definitively passing--the bottom of a page.) If AI is used, it should be optional. I happen not to like double-width intersentence space, but it keeps getting foisted on me essentially at random. Instead of fattening the manual with annoying duties like that quoted above, I suggest fattening it with a new request, "turn on/off doubling of spaces between apparent sentences", or "put at least the specified space between apparent sentences". One can still use \&, but then it's for a chosen purpose, not just defense against gremlins. Incidentally, "next to" in the quoted advice must be read with care. Sometimes it means before, sometimes after. ------------------------------------------------------------ In this old AI-induced trouble I see a cautionary lesson for paragraph-based line breaking. fmt(1) is an existing program that tries to do this. On unjustified text (i.e. all text handled by fmt) it produces paragraphs of different "optimal" widths, which can be even more distracting than unusually ragged right margins. Doug

5 years, 3 months

Fwd request: Text of Caldera's free licenses for UnixWare/OpenServer

by Warren Toomey

All, I was asked by Max to pass this query on to the TUHS list. Can you e-mail back to Max directly. Thanks, Warren ----- Forwarded message from Maximilian Lorlacks <maxlorlax(a)protonmail.com> ----- Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2020 19:46:38 +0000 From: Maximilian Lorlacks <maxlorlax(a)protonmail.com> To: "wkt(a)tuhs.org" <wkt(a)tuhs.org> Subject: Fwd request: Text of Caldera's free licenses for UnixWare/OpenServer Hi Warren, Could you please forward this to the TUHS list? I'm not a subscriber to the list, but I perhaps someone there might know something about this. In 2001 and early 2002 (I can't believe it's already been almost two decades), Caldera Systems, Inc. offered non-commercial licenses at no cost for OpenServer 5.0.6, UnixWare 7.1(.1?) and Open UNIX 8. However, the web archive could not to capture the actual agreement hidden behind the entrypoint form. I failed to get a license during that time since I wasn't really interested in UNIX at that point, but in the interest of historical preservation, I'm interested if anyone got those licenses from back then and if so, if they've saved the actual license agreement text. I'm interested in what it reads. I'm also curious about whether the license keys from back then still work with Xinuos's new registration platform, but it's probably too much to ask for people to test that. Please note that I am *not* trying to revive the trainwreck that is the issue of the validity and scope of the Ancient UNIX license. The only way to properly resolve that would be a letter signed from Micro Focus's legal department, but they've made it exceedingly clear that they will persistently ignore any and all attempts to elicit any kind of response regarding Ancient UNIX. Cheers, Max ----- End forwarded message -----

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] [TUHS} More Spider

by Doug McIlroy

> It might be worth mentioning that the Cambridge Ring (in the UK) used a very > similar idea: a head end circulated empty frames which stations could fill in. I'm quite sure the similarity is not accidental. Fraser began the Spider project almost immediately upon moving from Cambridge to Bell Labs. Doug

5 years, 3 months

Screen editors

by Paul Ruizendaal

> > On Jan 26, 2020, at 11:28 AM, arnold at skeeve.com wrote: > > > > "Jose R. Valverde via TUHS" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> wrote: > > > >> Talking of editors... > >> > >> On ancient UNIX, my editor of choice was 's' from Software Tools, its > >> main advantage being that it didn't require curses. > > > > That editor was from "A Software Tools Sampler" by Webb Miller, not > > "Software Tools" by Kernighan and Plauger. > Well, that would explain why I couldn’t find it. Do you have softcopy of the editor source? I’d really like a screen editor for v7…. Adam So do I. Editor source seems to be here: https://github.com/udo-munk/s If you are doing a build for V7, I’d be interested in hearing the results.

5 years, 3 months

More Spider

by Paul Ruizendaal

I noted with much pleasure that the main bitsavers site is back up, and that at some point it has added a full set of scans of “Datamation”. The Feb 1975 issue contains an article from Dr. Fraser about Spider and the network setup in Murray Hill early in 1975: http://bitsavers.org/pdf/datamation/197502.pdf For ease of reference I have also temporarily put the relevant 4 pages of the issue here: https://gitlab.com/pnru/spider/blob/master/spider.pdf I find the graphic that shows how Spider connected machines and departments the most interesting, as it helps understand how the pro’s and con’s of Arpa Unix might have been perceived at that time. The more I read, the more confused I become whether the “Pierce loop” was a precursor to “Spider” or a parallel effort. The facts appear to be that John Pierce (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Pierce) submitted his paper to BSTJ in December 1970, essentially describing a loop network with fixed size short datagrams, suggesting T1 frames. It is quite generic. In February 1971 W.J. Kropfl submits a paper that describes an implementation of the ideas in the Pierce paper with actual line protocols and a TIU. In October 1971 C.H. Coker describes in a 3rd paper how to interact with this TIU from a H516 programming perspective. Several Spider papers mention that the project was started in 1969 and that the first Spider link was operational in 1972. The team appears to be entirely different: the h/w is credited to Condon and Weller, and the s/w to Frazer, Jensen and Plaugher. The Spider TIU is much more complex (200 TTL chips vs. 50 in the Kropfl TIU). The main reason for that - at first glance - appears to be that in the Spider network the TIU handled guaranteed in order delivery (i.e managed time outs and retransmissions), whereas in the Kropfl implementation this was left to the hosts. It would seem logical that the latter was an evolution of the former, having been developed at the same site at the same time. A 1981 book seems to take that view as well: “Local Computer Network Technologies” by Carl Tropper includes the text "Spider Spider is an experimental data communications network which was built at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey) under the direction of A. G. Fraser. A detailed description of the network is given by Fraser [FRAS74]. This network was built with the notion of investigating Pierce's idea of ...” The chapter is titled “The Pierce loop and its derivatives”. This is a much as Google will give me - if somebody has the book please let me know. On the other hand, the Spider papers do not mention the Kropfl network or Pierce’s paper at all. The graphic in Datamation appears to show two Kropfl loops as part of the network setup. Yet, this is described in the accompanying text as "4. Honeywell 5l6: Supports research into comunications techniques and systems. The machine has a serial loop I/O bus threaded through several labs at Murray Hill. Equipment under test is connected either directly to the bus or to a minicomputer which is then connected to the bus. Also avail- able are graphics display terminals and a device that can write read-only memory chips.” Maybe this is a different bus, but if it is the same as the Kropfl loop, to call it a “serial loop I/O bus” suggests it was a parallel effort unrelated to Spider. Does anybody on the list recall whether Spider was a parallel effort or a continuation of the earlier work?

5 years, 3 months

A Dennisism

by Doug McIlroy

The anecdote below came from Nils-Peter Nelson, who as a manager in the computer center bought and installed the Labs' biggest Unix machine, a Cray 2. He also originated the string.h package. Doug Dennis told me he was going to a class reunion at Harvard. Me: "I guess you're the most famous member of your class." dmr: "No, the Unabomber is.

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] More Spider

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Ruizendaal > a loop network with fixed size short datagrams It might be worth mentioning that the Cambridge Ring (in the UK) used a very similar idea: a head end circulated empty frames which stations could fill in. I think it started slightly later, though. Material about it is available online. Noel

5 years, 3 months

Re: [TUHS] Spider

by Paul Ruizendaal

> Ugh. Memory lane has a lot of potholes. This was a really long time ago. Many thanks for that post - really interesting! I had to look up "Pierce Network", and found it described in the Bell Journal: https://ia801903.us.archive.org/31/items/bstj51-6-1133/bstj51-6-1133_text.p… In my reading the Spider network is a type of Pierce network. However, the network that you remember is indeed most likely different from Spider: - it was coax based, whereas the Spider line was a twisted pair - there was more than one, whereas Spider only ever had one (operational) loop Condon and Weller are acknowledged in the report about Spider as having done many of its hardware details. The report discusses learnings from the project and having to tune repeaters is not among them (but another operational issue with its 'line access modules’ is discussed). All in all, maybe these coax loops were pre-cursors to the Spider network, without a switch on the loop (“C” nodes in the Pierce paper). It makes sense to first try out the electrical and line data protocol before starting work on higher level functions. I have no idea what a GLANCE G is...

5 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix quix

by Doug McIlroy

The first edition ran on pdp-11, not pdp-7. Tukey buttered parsnips at the labs, but Brits did so several centuries before. Contrary to urban legend, patent was not invoked to justify the Unix pdp-11; word-processing was. The quiz does not make this mistake. The phototypesetter did not smell. The chemicals for (externally) devoloping photo paper did. Shahpazian is Dick Shahpazian; Maranzano is Joe Maranzano. cagbef addresses out of bounds. I appreciate Rob's discretion about the Waterloo theft. Doug

5 years, 4 months

[TUHS/groff] Provenance of .SB macro in man pages

by G. Branden Robinson

Hi folks, I've been adding a history subsection to the groff_man(7) page for the next groff release (date TBD) and thanks to the TUHS archives I've been able to answer almost all the questions I had about the origins of the man(7) language's macros and registers (number and string). I'm inlining my findings in rendered and source form below, but there's one feature I haven't been able to sort out--where did .SB (small bold) come from? The oldest groff release I can find online is 1.02 (June 1991), and .SB is already there, but I can't find it anywhere else. Is it a GNUism? Did it perhaps appear in a proprietary Unix first? I'm aware of Kristaps Dzonsons's history of Unix man pages[1], but unfortunately for me that is more of a history of the *roff system(s), and does not have much detail about the evolution of the man(7) macro language itself. If you can shed any light on this, I'd appreciate it! History Version 7 Unix (1979) supported all of the macros described in this page not listed as extensions, except .P, .SB, and the deprecated .AT and .UC. The only string registers defined were R and S; no number registers were documented. .UC appeared in 3BSD (1980) and .P in AT&T Unix System III (1980). 4BSD (1980) added lq and rq string registers. 4.3BSD (1986) added .AT and AT&T's .P. DEC Ultrix 11 (1988) added the Tm string register. .\" ==================================================================== .SS History .\" ==================================================================== . Version\~7 Unix (1979) supported all of the macros described in this page not listed as extensions, except .BR .P , .BR .SB , .\" .SS was implemented in tmac.an but not documented in man(7). and the deprecated .BR .AT and .BR .UC . . The only string registers defined were .B R and .BR S ; no number registers were documented. . .B .UC appeared in 3BSD (1980) and .B .P in AT&T Unix System\~III (1980). . 4BSD (1980) added .\" undocumented .VS and .VE macros to mark regions with 12-point box .\" rules (\[br]) as margin characters, as well as... .B lq and .B rq string registers. . 4.3BSD (1986) added .\" undocumented .DS and .DE macros for "displays", which are .RS/.RE .\" wrappers with filling disabled and vertical space of 1v before and .\" .5v after, as well as... .B .AT and AT&T's .BR .P . . DEC Ultrix\~11 (1988) added the .B Tm string register. . .\" TODO: Determine provenance of .SB. Regards, Branden [1] https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html

5 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Unix quix

by Nelson H. F. Beebe

On 1/22/20, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote: > Pretty interesting machine, if you study its instruction set, BTW; with no > stack, subroutines are 'interesting'. Another machine family like that was the CDC 6x00 and 7x00 machines of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I worked on a CDC 6400 for a few years. A call was done by storing the return address in the first word of the called routine, and jumping to its second word. The return was done with an indirect jump through the first word. That was fine for Fortran, which at the time had no concept of recursion. However, Urs Ammann implemented a compiler for Niklaus Wirth's Pascal language on a CDC 6400 (or 6600) in Zurich, and he had to simulate a stack. See On Code Generation in a PASCAL Compiler Software --- Practice and Experience 7(3) 391--423 May/June 1977 https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380070311 I have read that article in the past, but don't have download access from our academic library to get a copy to refresh my memory. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

5 years, 4 months

More oldies but goodies available if anyone wants them

by Jon Steinhart

Kind of scary what's in my basement. For those of you building UNIX workstations in the early days, I have a big fat notebook full of Weitek floating point chip specs, many of which are marked as preliminary. Also a set of CORBA specs. Again, low-hanging fruit that's getting recycled unless anyone has a use for them. In the not completely sure that I want to part with them yet for some strange reason, I have a set of SunOS manuals. Also, if anyone collects old hardware I have a SparcStation 20 with a slightly modified SunOS sitting around and an Ultra 60 Solaris box. Jon

5 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Spider (and back to quiz)

by Paul Ruizendaal

There is more in that issue of BSTJ, and indeed it seems this was a precursor. https://ia801905.us.archive.org/25/items/bstj51-6-1147/bstj51-6-1147_text.p… https://ia801603.us.archive.org/0/items/bstj51-6-1167/bstj51-6-1167_text.pdf The first paper makes mention of repeaters starting to self oscillate, and a redesign being underway. There is a possibility that a Unix PDP11 was connected to this earlier network prior to Spider existing, in which case the accepted quiz answer would be wrong. >> Ugh. Memory lane has a lot of potholes. This was a really long time ago. > > Many thanks for that post - really interesting! > > I had to look up "Pierce Network", and found it described in the Bell Journal: > https://ia801903.us.archive.org/31/items/bstj51-6-1133/bstj51-6-1133_text.p… > > In my reading the Spider network is a type of Pierce network. > > However, the network that you remember is indeed most likely different from Spider: > - it was coax based, whereas the Spider line was a twisted pair > - there was more than one, whereas Spider only ever had one (operational) loop > > Condon and Weller are acknowledged in the report about Spider as having done many of its hardware details. The report discusses learnings from the project and having to tune repeaters is not among them (but another operational issue with its 'line access modules’ is discussed). > > All in all, maybe these coax loops were pre-cursors to the Spider network, without a switch on the loop (“C” nodes in the Pierce paper). It makes sense to first try out the electrical and line data protocol before starting work on higher level functions. > > I have no idea what a GLANCE G is...

5 years, 4 months

Another oldie but goodie available if anyone wants it [ DECNET ]

by Jon Steinhart

Was looking for my DomainOS manuals and came across a fat notebook containing the DECNET Phase III spec. Anyone want it? Not anything that I need to keep and low-hanging fruit on the decluttering list. Jon

5 years, 4 months

Re: [TUHS] Spider

by Paul Ruizendaal

> I have vague memories here that maybe Heinz can help with if his are any better. > I believe that Sandy played a part in "the loop" or "the ring" or whatever it > was called that we had connecting our Honeywell 516 to peripherals. I do > remember the 74S00 repeaters because of the amount of time that Dave Weller > spent tuning them when the error rate got high. Also, being a loop, Joe > Condon used to pull his connectors out of the wall whenever people weren't > showing up to a meeting on time. I don't know whether our network was a > forerunner to the spider network. It most likely was Spider - it became operational in 1972. The vist report that I linked to earlier also says: "The current system contains just one loop with the switching computer (TEMPO I), four PDP-11/45 computers, two Honeywell 516 computers, two DDP 224 computers, and one each of Honeywell 6070, PDP-8 and PDP-11/20. In fact many of these are connected in turn to other items of digital equipment.” It would be interesting to know more about the H516’s and Spider, any other recollections?

5 years, 4 months

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