test-drb August 2015

test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

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257 discussions

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Booting an IBM MP 3000 S/390 System

by marc.verdiell＠gmail.com

Wow. I'll never complain again that it takes too long to boot Windows...

10 years

Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Eric Christopherson > people who like to program in languages or language implementations or > libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? I prefer to write code under (effectively) V6 Unix; I find that I can get things working and done faster there than in any other environment. Of course, if one sticks to just the Standard I/O library, you can get more or less than same environment pretty much everywhere: Windows, Linux, etc. > From: Sean Conner > My current Holy Grail piece of software would be Synthesis OS---an > operating system written in assembly (in 1991) that can recompile and > specialize itself on the fly [6]---basically, a program can request and get > custom system calls to use. > ... > [6] http://valerieaurora.org/synthesis/SynthesisOS/ Wow. I had a look at that site: Very Very Very Cool. Is source still extant anywhere? (I know, I could email the creator...) Also, ISTR a post which talked about Guy Steele working on EMACS. I don't think that can be correct - Guy had, IIRC, departed MIT before I got to Tech Sq, and EMACS had just started being developed when I got there. As to who actually did do EMACS, it was a cast of characters, and I wasn't enough part of it to know who should be listed. RMS was, of course, primus inter pares, but there were others. E.g. I remember Gene Cicarelli did some stuff. There was this thing called IVORY which IIRC 'purified' TECO code so that it could be dumped out in a compressed form (for faster loading, execution, etc - it may have also been possible to have it read-only, and the page(s) shared between multiple EMACS instances, but my memory is foggy on this), and Gene did that. Noel

10 years

MTS

by lyndon＠orthanc.ca

There have been a few references to MTS over the past couple of months that led me to suspect people are running it under Hercules. I did some poking around a while back and managed to find some tape images (bitsaver, I think), and did some cursory reading of the release notes. I think there might be enough there to IPL and perform a basic installation, but what immediately caught my attention was the mention that sites had to purchase ASMH from IBM, which leads me to believe the public distributions don't contain an assembler. I cut my teeth on *real* computers on the U of Alberta's Amdahl running MTS, and I can't possibly imagine using it without an assembler. So my first question is: is anyone running MTS under Hercules from these public images? And if yes, question 2 is: which languages are included? One of the main reasons I would like to get MTS running would be to play around with the scheduler code. I remember some changes that were introduced circa 1981 that - I thought - destroyed the interactive response time of the system. E.g. APL went from being a joy to practically un-usable, IMO. I've always wanted to poke around in there and see if I couldn't fix it. And to get thoroughly esoteric and obscure, what are the odds that someone out there squirreled away an archive of SHOW:? from UQV-MTS? --lyndon

10 years

Adding a Hard Drive to an Original IBM PC Using a Raspberry Pi

by fozztexx＠fozztexx.com

One of my favorite old computers to tinker with is a rev B IBM PC. I recently moved it out into my living room to hopefully inspire me to mess with it more, but I still didn?t want to mess with having to put everything on 360k floppies. With all the slots occupied I had to find another solution for mass storage. Raspberry Pi to the rescue! I was able to use XTIDE and a Pi to emulate a hard drive over the RS232 port. All the details are here on my blog post: http://www.insentricity.com/a.cl/244 -- Follow me on twitter: @FozzTexx Check out my blog: http://insentricity.com

10 years

SCSI Tape to TAP utility

by cclist＠sydex.com

A couple of weeks ago, I offered to share the source and executable for a SCSI tape-to-SIMH .TAP file utility for MSDOS. To run it, you'll need an ASPI driver for your SCSI adapter. It was compiled using MSC 8.00C. Find it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6qiudlpyitgxom/STP2T02.ZIP?dl=0 Enjoy, Chuck ------------------------------------------------------------- "The first thing we do, let's kill all the spammers."

10 years

FOR SALE: HP 700/92 green screen monitor

by shawn-gordon＠cox.net

Excellent condition, $100 plus shipping or best offer.

10 years

Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Paul Koning > Algol 60, that is. It was used as the inspiration by just about > everything that followed I've just remembered that the Algol (probably Algol-60, but the manual doesn't say) interpreter used for the programming languages course at MIT was adapted from the Delphi (a homebrew PDP-11 OS used at MIT) version, to a version that would run under Unix V6. So it should be runnable under any PDP-11 emulator. I _think_ I have that on those backup tapes I'm trying to get read, so maybe someday (it's a pity none of that MIT Unix stuff seems to have escaped into preservation, at least, so far) it will be widely available. They had a BCPL compiler for the PDP-11 that ran under Unix, too. Ditto about 'on the tape'. > From: Phil Budne > Mostly I write SNOBOL4 throw away programs for textual transformations. Huh, that's what Regex-Replace is for! ;-) Noel

10 years

Apollo DN series HP root account

by wcn440＠gmail.com

I have a vintage apollo question... In the late 1980's when HP acquired Apollo Computer Inc, I recall there was an HP root account, that shipped with every new machine. In many cases this account was not removed. I recently acquired a DN3000 and to my amazement it was clean, and booted to an SR10.4 login prompt. Does anybody remember that HP account and password? Alternative cracks would be welcomed as well. Bill Newman

10 years

Classic programming

by echristopherson＠gmail.com

Is there a subset of this group for people who like to program in languages or language implementations or libraries that are no longer in common mainstream use? Or other groups for such a thing? -- Eric Christopherson

10 years

Classic programming

by jnc＠mercury.lcs.mit.edu

> From: Johnny Billquist > And one should not forget Algol. IIRC, Algol is mentioned in the paper I linked to. Of course, Algol's DNA is in pretty much every procedural language ever created since it was. > From: Andy Holt > (and, for that matter, PL/1 should probably be considered an unsung > inspiration for C as it was the implementation language for Multics > in which Bell labs was a partner and must have inspired at least > the name for Unix) The paper also mentions PL/I - IIRC, they (Ken, Dennis et al) had used it on Multics, and didn't like it. (Which I can understand!) I'm not sure there are any ideas from PL/I (specifically) which influenced C. Multics' influence on Unix is a very sizeable topic, which I won't derail into - it's an interest of mine, and I've been doing research on that; my hope is to do a paper on it at some point. The executive abstract is that the two extremes one hears ('Unix is derived from Multics'/'Unix is in fact a counter-reaction to Multics') aren't really accurate - the truth is in the middle. Noel

10 years

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test-drb August 2015