Here they were ...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3311/3214242023_ca5f2425a2_o.jpg
Dave
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of ben
> Sent: 10 January 2017 06:50
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
> Subject: Re: Contacting Jay West
>
> On 1/9/2017 3:13 PM, geneb wrote:
> > On Mon, 9 Jan 2017, Rob Jarratt wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> No HP-2000 problem, just wasn't HP-2000 sure if I had sent it to the
> >> right place HP-2000.
> >>
> > "Meet single HP-2000 in your area!"
> >
> > g.
> >
>
> Where are the Female Computers?
> Hal
> From: Phil Budne
> I've always assumed the P in PAL was for paper tape.
> The Wikipedia artile for PDP-8 says that PAL-8 assembled from paper
> tape into memory, so the A and L could have been for Assembler and
> Loader.
I have a number of different versions of the "PDP-11 Paper Tape Software"
manual, and the earliest one (DEC-11-GGPB-D, March '71) turns out to be for
PAL-11A, and it says it stands for "Program Assembly Language for the
PDP-11's Absolute Assembler" (pg. 3-1).
Amusing factoid: the manual says it takes about 45 minutes to re-assemble
PAL-11A from the source tape, and punch a new binary tape (this is using the
HSRP).
> ISTR PAL-11A was also an "absolute" assembler (did not output REL
> files), but there was also a PAL-11R.
Yup. PAL-11A took an input an ASCII tape with the program, and produced as
output "an absolute binary tape" (pg. 3-23).
A later version of the 'Paper Tape Software' manual (DEC-11-ASDB-D, May '71)
covers PAL11-R (although it does not, alas, decribe the relocatable output
format in detail - although I think it's documented elsewhere), and also
Link-11 and Libr-11. PAL11-R require DOS.
Noel
> From: Paul Koning
> Is that the Unix assembler convention?
Yup. From "Unix Assembler Reference Manual" (by DMR; no date, but the one I'm
looking at came with V6): "An octal constant consists of a sequence of digits
... A decimal constant consists of a sequence of digits terminated by a decimal
point '.'."
> It certainly isn't the one used by the GNU assemblers, which are modeled
> after the old Unix syntax.
Except when they gratuitously change things.
Noel
> From: Brent Hilpert
>>>> One assembler doc uses a prefix of "&o"
> So the answer is, by modern expectations the old standard would be
> ambiguous or misleading.
Well, the ideas of 'assembler' and 'standard' don't really go together in my
mind... :-)
But seriously, I don't know how many different PDP-11 assemblers there were,
but the two _main_ ones (DEC's, and Unix's) both use the same numeric
convention (although they differed in other ways, probably because of the
CTSS/Multics erase character convention): a sequence of digits is an octal
number, unless there's a trailing '.', in which case it's decimal.
(Well, technically, DEC had PAL-11 and MACRO-11, but PAL-11 was basically a
subset of MACRO-11, and used the same number syntax.)
I've never heard of that '&o' bizzaro-stuff - where did you find that?
Noel
In a message dated 1/9/2017 6:45:32 A.M. US Mountain Standard Time,
pontus at Update.UU.SE writes:
On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 01:31:28PM -0000, Rob Jarratt wrote:
> I sent a private email to Jay West a few days ago but I have not had a
> reply. He may be away or I may have the wrong address for him. What is
the
> best way to contact him?
>
A bit of patience I think. He seems quite busy sometimes.
/P
put hp-2000 in the title? <grin!>
> From: Lars Brinkhoff
> What's the difference between PAL-11 and MACRO-11?
Without going through the manuals at length, basically MACRO-11 supports
macros, and PAL-11 doesn't. The syntax is otherwise very similar.
> PALX is also the name for a cross assembler targeting PDP-11.
I know it was used on ITS (although the PALX source had assembly options for
all the main PDP-10 OS's, except TOPS-10), was that where it was written, do
you happen to know? It's in MIDAS, so probably...
Noel
An image gallery of cheesy -- and cheese-cakey -- magazine covers from
what were for me the golden days.
But the UK mags weren't ever like this.
Some of the names, and the typos, are highly amusing.
http://imgur.com/gallery/3Jlqh
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? Google Mail/Talk/Plus: lproven at gmail.com
Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven ? Skype/LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven
UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +420 702 829 053
OK, what was the standard (if there was one) number-base syntax for PDP-11 assembler?
Despite all the PDP-11 assembly info on web sites, this seems to be a buried bit of info.
One assembler doc uses a prefix of "&o", another specifies octal as default and prefix of zero for decimal (opposite of the common C-derived standard . . great).
Is this for example standard?:
BIT #&o200, @#&o177564 ; test 2^7 bit at address octal 177564
(I'm just trying to make some written commentary consistent with common policy.)
On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have some Xcelite tools from the early 1980s. They have been stinky
> for over 30 years.
Same experience. I have some in a drawer on my work work-bench that
were purchased in the early 80s and they still smell.
> Definitely a butyrate stink (I used to
> run chemistry shows at The Center of Science and Industry - one was on
> Esters... we mixed a variety of alcohols with a variety of fatty acids
> and let the audience smell the results... it was all fun and games
> until I spilled 200ml of Butyric Acid on myself... :-P )
In high school chemistry we did some experiments with that stuff. I
think the teacher just liked to stink up the school every year.
Now I also have a bunch of drawers filled with Allen-Bradley carbon
composition resistors from around 1970. All the leads have a whitish
film on them that has a peculiar odor. They've been in the electrical
lab at work, in an office environment since that time. I've always
been a little curious about what caused it.
-chuck
I'm looking at a sample of what I see as a directory of sorts and am
attempting to decode the file names from it. They're not anything as
elegant as Rad50, but the encoding has escaped my weary brain.
The system in question is a Lanier 103 word processor.
Here are some samples. Can anyone come up with the encoding scheme? It
can't be very complex as this was a comparatively brain-dead system:
(All values in hex)
c4 a3 75 6a ab 52 00 00
5c 25 15 1b 4c 40 00 00
cd 6d 15 7a a6 10 cb 82
a1 7a c1 c0 00 00 00 00
94 2f 38 40 00 00 00 00
d0 7f 9f 12 25 fd 53 28
The recurrence of these strings in what appears to be a block directory
in the same position tell me that they must be file names. The file
data itself is in ASCII, more or less (special formatting codes). The
distribution of values to me suggests some sort of bit-packing algorithm
is involved.
Thanks for any suggestions.
--Chuck