Help installing HP 2000 contributed library in simh

Assuming that your tapes are sources, there are several folks with operational HP 21xx/1000 computers who probably have paper-tape-reading capability. Dumping the tape to a PC-hosted terminal emulator can capture the text into a host-PC file, which can then be loaded into the simulator via the simulated paper tape reader. So I wouldn't discard them just yet.

I had retained a stack of 1/2" mag tape dumps of our company RTE system holding all of the programs I had written over a period of twenty years or so. A fellow enthusiast in my area (Mike Gemeny) kindly copied them to SIMH-compatible tape images, which I was then able to use to recreate our company system under simulation.

The RTE (Real-Time Executive) family of operating systems had a long run at HP -- from about 1968 through 2005 or so, with a dozen or so variants from simple to sophisticated. Languages supported included the HP assembler, FORTRAN IV, ALGOL 60 (partial), BASIC, Fortran 77, and Pascal. The RTE-II software kit on the HP simulator site has the assembler and FORTRAN IV compiler preloaded, and it's easy to add the ALGOL compiler from the HP software collection on Bitsavers. Fortran 77 and Pascal required later versions of RTE (I intend to get kits posted for these before too long). Perhaps most interesting to me is a SNOBOL3 interpreter in the HP contributed library that ran under the DOS-III operating system. It was written by HP Grenoble, and all of the prompts and error messages were in French. I used it to write a runoff clone way back when. Still have my "SNOBOL3 Primer" by Allen Forte (MIT Press, 1968) sitting on my bookshelf.