I could care less about telnet... I want to make the teletype ?clack! ? Ed#
Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone
-------- Original message --------
From: Rod Smallwood <rodsmallwood52 at btinternet.com>
Date: 10/16/16 18:39 (GMT-07:00)
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: Re: VCFed, the BBS!
On 16/10/2016 14:10, william degnan wrote:
> On Oct 16, 2016 5:52 AM, "Evan Koblentz" <cctalk at snarc.net> wrote:
>>> I mean? please add 110? Baud? Evan!
>>
>> I was giving examples, not carved-in-stone specifications.
> If the system is simple it'll be easier to support, 110b is not, given the
> number of persons coming in from the other end so slowly.? No one barely
> has a phone line anymore as it is, most (95%) of the external traffic will
> be telnet.? If the bbs allows those few of us with phone lines to connect
> at 300 to 1200b to get to a handshake and resolve to a simple welcome
> screen for hardware testing purposes, that would be a good start. Get that
> running see what kind of traffic results, and plan phase ii from there.
>
> I imagine it will be best once this system is up and running that people
> call in on Sunday afternoon so visitors to the museum hear the inbound
> calls in real time like a sys op would running a bbs from his basement.
> Bill
Speaking as a former Sysop from the 1980's.
What would be nice is a couple of DEC Rainbows running FidoBBS and
connected via a phone line simulator.
Enter your mail message on one and see it get transferred to the other
where it can be read.
Rod Smallwood
--
*PDP-8/e PDP-8/f PDP-8/m PDP-8/i Front Panels ex Stock - Order Now*
> From: Rich Alderson
> Yes, the d/r card is strictly level conversion, and the microcode in
> the Xilinx does all the Massbus protocol.
So if you don't mind continuing to indulge my curiousity (thanks for all the
indulgence so far :-), is the D/R card a daughtercard that mounts on the Mesa
(my guess)?
Noel
> From: Liam Proven
> It boots, and with a borrowed mouse, GUI apps work
There was a new blog post which I don't think was mentioned here yet:
http://www.righto.com/2016/10/restoring-ycs-xerox-alto-day-10-new.html
but it doesn't cover the borrowed mouse; does cover getting the CPU 100%
working, though.
Noel
I have two IBM 21F5093 AS/400 8-port twinax to DB25 adapters with clip
mounts.
Looks like the coil is about 14-16 feet of cable.
Pics on request.
Free for the cost of shipping (01888 metro-west Boston,MA , about 3 lbs
each)
Need the space, gotta go.
> From: Warren Toomey wkt at tuhs.org
> To load V6, you need to build a virtual tape which replicates the V6
> tape.
Err, there's the problem. The V6 boot tape consists of 3 'dd' images of RK05
V6 file systems (one each root, source, and doc), with a 'boot block' on the
tape which can copy them to RK05 packs; there is no standalone 'mkfs', etc.
Now, if I were willing to wait for the transfer of the entire 4K blocks, I
could use that approach, but... my only working mass storage device
(currently - more on the way, at some point) is an RX02 - much smaller. So I
_can't_ go that way, my only choice is to replicate the V7-type process
(stand-alone 'mkfs', etc), for V6.
Although I suppose I could use an emulator (I have been using Ersatz-11 to
run V6 for quite a while now) to produce a RX02-sized file system, with just
the stuff it needs to boot ('init', 'sh', etc), and use VTServer to transfer
that over. And I'd probably have to tweak the client-side code to write raw
images to disk (not sure if it already knows how to do that).
> the problem is that both "boot" and "vtboot.pdp" contain the
> client-side code to talk to the server, and it seems that I didn't
> supply the source code for this.
> ...
> Hah, the file .. v7_standalone.tar.gz has the source code for the
> standalone tools
Yup, found that some years back when I first found VTServer.
> Alternatively, if you have a working V6 environment (e.g. a simulator),
> you could bring in the vtclient.c code and integrate it into the V6
> boot binary.
The only V6 boot mechanisms are 1-block programs that go into block 0 of
device 0 and which boot Unix directly from that file-system (type a file
name, and it loads that file and starts it). So there is no second-stage boot
program to integrate the VT client into (although obviously I could port the
second-stage bootstrap to V6).
> From: Ian S. King
> I know I made it work and booted V6 on my 11/34.
I'll start with getting VTServer to run under V6 (my only Unix, don't have
anything later :-), so if you turn up whatever you used to boot V6, it would
probably still be useful.
Noel
Hi all, an early version of VTServer is still at:
http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Tools/Tapes/Vtserver/
I think some others took it and extended; Fred van Kempen springs to
mind.
To load V6, you need to build a virtual tape which replicates the
V6 tape. Hopefully this is easy to do.
However, the problem is that both "boot" and "vtboot.pdp" contain the
client-side code to talk to the server, and it seems that I didn't
supply the source code for this.
I'll go home and dig through my old stuff and see what I can find.
Cheers, Warren
> From: "Ian S. King"
> ISTR that one can generate a 'tape' config file with whatever components
> you want/need.
Right, I saw that, but I need the V6 components...
> I know there are v6-specific tools somewhere ... I think it's somewhere
> in the TUHS site, and not completely obvious so you have to hunt a bit.
Any hints you could provide would be most gratefully received. I looked in the
source tree, and doing a search for "mkfs" only turned up the normal V6
mkfs. (Note that for the V7 one, the source for the standalone and Unix
versions is one file, which has #ifdefs. That seems to be the one that's in
the VTServer tree.)
I had a pretty extensive walk through the archive 'back when' I first found
out about TUHS, and I don't think I saw V6 versions (I would likely have
grabbed them, if I had); I did find (and grab) VTServer, along with a bunch of
other stuff. I just took another quick skim, couldn't find them.
I would have guessed that they didn't exist, since that whole method of
putting Unix on a machine didn't exist until V7, so it wouldn't have been
written 'back in the day'.
Noel
So, I'm trying to do what VTServer was invented for - load Unix into an actual
PDP-11, over its serial line, when one doesn't have machine-readable Unix on
any mass storage for the machine.
However, all the initial code that VTServer loads ('mkfs', etc) is V7-specific
(V6 has a slightly different file system format) - and I want to install V6.
Has anyone ever tweaked the programs which VTServer loads to do V6-format
filesystems? I did a quick Google, but didn't see anything.
No biggie if not, it won't be much work to adapt them all, but I figured I'd
try to avoid re-inventing the wheel...
Noel
> From: Rich Alderson
> There have been 2 generations of Massbus Disk Emulator (MDE) at LCM.
Thanks for the bits... very interesting.
> Data was transferred via FTP over a 100baseT crossover cable connected
> to a Slackware server; the Rabbit was able to keep up with 4 drives at
> this speed
Were the bits actually stored on the Slackware server, or was it just used to
put bits on the 'drive' to start with? If the latter, what were the actual
bits stored on? (I know, not that relevant, since this is the prior rev, but
I'm curious.)
> a Mesa 5i22 Anything I/O card (includes a Xilinx Spartan-III FPGA) that
> plugs directly into the PCI bus in a server-class X86-64 box, and used
> a revision of a separate driver/receiver card designed for MDE 1.0 to
> connect to the Massbus
Let me make sure I understand this; was there some sort of cable or somehow a
connection from the Mesa 5i22 directly to the driver/receiver card, which was
purely 'level conversion', with the Mesa doing the 'protocol' on the MASSBUS?
(I.e. they didn't communicate over the PCI bus?)
> a control program for the PC side which runs under Windows 2008/2012
> Server.
So the actual bits are stored on something (disk?) controlled by the PC?
Noel