2 Mar
2008
2 Mar
'08
5:27 p.m.
Why can't the driver(s) for RAM disks be used? Then the hardware
interface might be a whole lot simpler, just make the IDE drive look
like an extended section of memory.
At 11:16 AM 3/2/2008, you wrote:
On Sun, Mar 02, 2008 at 07:18:51AM -0800, Bob Armstrong
wrote:
have all the
Ethan
Dicks (ethan.dicks at usap.gov) wrote:
All true, although it might not be as bad as it sounds. There are a lot
of people on this list, and some of them used old DEC computers and
operating systems. Some of them might already know how to write a driver
for one of these OSes - get a group of them together and you'll On Sat, Mar 01, 2008 at 08:35:14PM -0500, Charles
H Dickman wrote:
...
Software development for a 20 year old OS is not easy.
And in the case of the PDP-11, several 20-year-old OSes, or in the case
of the VAX, a few old OSes, of many versions. old OSes covered.
True, but there are a lot of dusty neurons to polish before much progress
could be made. I haven't written a device driver for DEC hardware in
over 15 years (I've worked on Ultrix, and VMS 4.x and VMS 5.x, myself).
... the first thing you should do is
hack up simh to include emulation of your proposed new "RQATA" interface
card; then you could start writing drivers before the hardware was even
done, and simh is a great tool for debugging the driver software.
That's an excellent suggestion (and I say that having helped Bob Supnik
debug one of _his_ drivers long ago).
OTOH, the SBC6120 was sort of my experiment in
open source old computer
development. I always hoped people would expand and add to it, both in
hardware and software, but for the most part that never really happened.
Most people wanted to buy a turnkey system that they could plug
in, turn on,
and start using it - people seem to have jobs,
families and real lives and
just don't have the time to do a lot of development.
From my own standpoint, especially since I have an
IOB6120 and FP6120,
it does pretty much everything I'd want it to do. About the
only feature
I can think of off the top of my head would be to jimmy the IOB6120
FPGA firmware to be able to talk to a real RX01/RX02 hanging off of the
I/O pins (with suitable line drivers/receivers, of course). I'd probably
only want that to be able to image disks, anyway, though. Out of the box,
the SBC6120 boots up OS/8 and that works for most of what I'd do with a
"real" PDP-8 anyway - boot it up, play a few games, and marvel at what's
going on under the hood.
In terms of software dev, folks can just as easily fire up simh and work
on software there. I always thought the appeal of the SBC6120 was to
have a real 12-bit machine in ones hands, not the developement aspect of it.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 2-Mar-2008 at 15:49 Z
South Pole Station
PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -52.8 F (-47.1 C) Windchill -87.4 F (-66.3 C)
APO AP 96598 Wind 13.4 kts Grid 12 Barometer 685.9 mb (10406 ft)
Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html