22 Jul
2013
22 Jul
'13
11:55 a.m.
From: rescue
Sent: Sunday, July 21, 2013 9:23 PM
I have 3 tapes that I have re-discovered that came
from my earliest
college days.
They have stuff from my days on a TOPS-10 system.
I have a DEC SCSI based tabletop tape drive to read
these with.
What is the best way to image these, preserving their
contents ?
Also, what software will put these in a format I can
use with an
emulator ?
The best software for imaging the tapes will automagically put them
into a format usable by SimH and KLH10. The question is, what do you
have to drive your tape drive? (I use an M4 9914 drive on a Toad-1,
but that's not an option for most people. :-)
Does anyone know if any of the emulators can mount the
tapes directly
from the emulator through the SCSI bus ? Or is the only way to image
these in a format compatible with the emulators ?
People are working on all kinds of hacks for SimH with respect to real
hardware, but since most of the software for any of the systems that
have SimH emulators is in tape images, I don't think anyone is doing
the work to make real tape drives work with them.
Anyone know what the best emulator is for DECsystem10
? How about
DECsystem 20 ?
SimH emulates only a KS10 processor, and will allow you to run Tops-10
7.04 or TOPS-20 4.1 (or ITS, but that's an entirely different kettle
of lutefisk). For Tops-10 work, it's entirely sufficient.
KLH10 emulates either a KL10 "Model B" or a KS10 (in either DEC or
ITS configurations). The KL10 emulator is the only one that will allow
you to run TOPS-20 releases past 4.1; the distributed TOPS-20 system
is 7.1, with Panda enhancements. It also runs Tops-10 7.04 quite nicely
(though neither Ken Harrenstien nor Mark Crispin cared to distribute
that).
I guarantee you that no one has done any work to make any of the
KLH10 emulators drive a real tape drive; feel free to contribute
if you decide to do that yourself.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/