HP 2000F'

I believe that the NAM-, and Z999 thing were part of 2000C and 2000C'. I may have accidentally implied that this existed in 2000F and beyond. It didn't. We tried. Again, this likely was under 2000C or C', which I believe only supported text file types. When the NAM-, trick was pulled, the 64K block size limit seemed to be removed. The system would try to create a file of any size specified. My recollection is that in normal cases, the space on disk had to be contiguous, so if there wasn't enough contiguous space to create the file, the create would fail. But, in the case of the "overhead" account, it appears that this restriction was lifted, and it'd hunt all over the disk for unused blocks and claim them, which really slowed the system down, and, if too large a filesize was specified would cause the system to crash, as it'd run out disk space. When we did the NAM-, trick, then did a "CATalog" command, the account was listed as Z999, and not the account we were logged into originally. There seemed to be no way to "escape" back to the original login account without logging off, and dialing back in. Interestingly enough, if we did a big file CREation, we could just shut off the teletype, and the CREate would continue to run (as evidenced by the other teletypes stopping I/O activity) until complete, then the login would be terminated. It appeared that the carrier loss interrupt on the IOP, or the communications between the IOP and executive were "tied up" during the CREate process. Whatever the case, it's clear that the "CREate" operation was a blocking operation. The installation we had at our high school (actually, the system was owned by what was called the Multnomah County (Oregon) Intermediate Education District, which served a number of middle schools and high schools in East Multomah County. Since the system served a lot of users, disk space was limited to 100 or 200 blocks. Usually Freshman and Sophomore students got 100 blocks, and Junior and Senior students got 200, because the projects were larger. A local community college (Mt. Hood Community College) had their own 2000/Access system, and user accounts were given significantly more disk blocks than we were allowed. As you said, it's all site-dependent in terms of the amount of disk space allocated for each account. I visited the data center at MCIED at one point in time. At the time, I believe that they were running 2000C. There were two CPU's, one that ran the TSB executive, and another that did I/O. The machine had a multi-platter "washing machine" style disk drive (top load), and an HP 9-track tape drive. I believe it had 32 phone lines attached to it. The modem bank was in a back room, and consisted of a bunch of Bell 103 datasets (later upgraded to 1200-baud datasets, I think once 2000F came around). The CPUs I believe were 2100's, and there was a paper tape reader/punch unit. There was also the "fixed head" disk, and one could use the SANctify (as A000) command to make a program resident on the fixed head disk for much faster access. Swapping activities also occurred on the fixed head disk. I know that it existed, because the fixed disk "crashed" a few times, resulting in multi-day outages. Once 2000F came around, the fixed head disk wasn't needed, and reliability increased quite a bit. At first we had only ASR-33 teletypes, but once 2000F rolled around we started getting some DECWriter II's that could do 1200 baud. What a difference that made. Downside was that the DECWriters didn't have paper tape, so we had to resort to loading programs pre-punched on tape (we had a bunch of offline ASR33's for tape preparation) on one of the online ASR-33's to load new programs, then migrate to the DECWriters for test/debugging. Seems to me that it might be possible to build a pretty simple emulator for the fixed head disk device using either Battery-Backed static RAM, or perhaps fast flash memory. The tough part would be emulating the DMA cycles. We never had 2000E, nor 2000A/B. On 2000/E, without a tape drive, how were backups done? The service bureau started with 2000C, and upgraded along the line to C', F, then added a second system that was running 2000F', then both systems were upgraded to 2000/Access over a period of time. Sometime in the early '80's, with the advent of microcomputers, schools started building up their own systems with BASIC (our high school built an IMSAI kit, and a Sol-20 while I was there), and started using these with 8K-BASIC to supplement the timeshare systems. I believe sometime around '84 or '85, the TSB systems were decommissioned, and offered for sale. Some acquaintences I know tried to pool financial resources to acquire them, but the IED wanted a LOT of money for them, even though they were quite antiquated by that time. To my knowledge, they sat for quite some time, and then were sold to a scrapper, who mercilessly destroyed the systems to reclaim the gold. I kept in touch with my teacher for a period of time after I graduated, and they had started using Apple II's as the primary teaching machines. Last I saw him, they had a Corvus shared disk drive connected to "networked" Apple II's. I then lost touch with him after the school district re-organized, and I've tried many times to try to find him, but to no avail. I'd love to find the pieces to put a system together, but given the scarcity of parts, and the costs involved, it's probably way beyond my means. Worse yet, as time goes by, the stuff becomes more and more scarce. Probably have to settle with memories of those fun times. -Rick