On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 18:28, David Williams via cctalk wrote:
Still have a box of paper tapes from back then that I
suspect I'll
never be able to do anything with again but the pack rat in me refuses
to let go. Every so often I consider trying to decode them again.
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.
That's the old Yahoo group isn't it?
It is. I think they were migrating from Yahoo to the groups.io site.
Any other suggestions of interesting operating systems
or software to
try out besides TSB? Interesting development environments or uncommon
or unusual languages tend to grab my interest.
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.
-- Dave