9 May
2025
9 May
'25
12:15 a.m.
Makes sense, IPL (instruction program load?) - how were the disk packs
initialized to indicate it was an IPL media? I assume the content to be
loaded had to be on a specific sector or of a file-type indicating it is to
be loaded on startup? And it is "boot to BASIC" (in quotes) mainly because
the operator has to do the effort of at least inserting the proper disk
(but it was a "pack", not just a single disk?)
I assume SCP is a serial line of some fashion, to support that idea of
remote-loading of an OS or startup software? Kind-of sort of an early form
of PXE to "boot from a network"?
While we're here, another note: on the SCAMP, they emulated the IBM 1130's
version of APL (so I may have misspoken earlier - it wasn't an IBM S/3 they
had trouble sourcing, but rather during the SCAMP dev it was an IBM 1130
they had trouble finding to borrow/lease). This SCAMP was the prototype
leading to the IBM 5100 (where in the IBM 5100, they switched to using an
S/360 based APL).
On an off-chance of any IBMers out there, I'm still looking for Kitty Price
or Patrick Smith (two known experts of the PALM processor, they wrote a
paper referring to it in 1974). In the appendix of that paper, they refer
to a "1130 PALM Simulator" (i.e. before the PALM was available to them,
someone had developed a simulator of it on the 1130). Then in the next
section, they refer to a "1130 Simulator which runs under VM/370". Finding
any of that software would be incredible.
<SCAMP/IBM_SCAMP_1of3_May1974_AnArchitecturalAndDesignOverviewOfScamp_PatrickSmith_KittyPrice_Part1.pdf
at main · voidstar78/SCAMP
<https://github.com/voidstar78/SCAMP/blob/main/IBM_SCAMP_1of3_May1974_AnArchitecturalAndDesignOverviewOfScamp_PatrickSmith_KittyPrice_Part1.pdf
On Thu, May 8, 2025 at 2:38 PM Henk Stegeman via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
> A few corrections:
> The BASIC on the S/3 model 6 was a "boot to BASIC" system. You could IPL
> BASIC from R1
> or business SCP from F1.
> This BASIC system had virtual memory implemented. Real storage was 8 or
> 16k but in the
> BASIC environment approximately 54KB was available during execution.
> Only thing IBM did was reuse of the Psuedo machine code definition in
> the 5100.
> Another nice feature of this BASIC was the online helpfiles.
> Regards Henk