26 Aug
2012
26 Aug
'12
6:04 p.m.
At 08:11 PM 8/26/2012, Al Kossow wrote:
On 8/26/12 9:45 AM, Rick Murphy wrote:
No, unfortunately. That's something I really regret as there was no
easy way to get stuff off my PDP-8 in a portable form.
It wasn't trivial to get the RK05 to work as an alternative since TSS-8
assumes a disk device that can be read or written a word at a time. I/O
that wasn't sector sized or sector aligned had to be buffered and
copied out to the real memory locations.
I gave away my PDP-8, disk packs and all, when I got married. I don't
think I should say much more than that. :)
-Rick
This isn't just speculation - my first job at
DEC was in the group
that supported TSS/8. I've seen the effort necessary to do much
simpler things given the memory available - for example, replacing
the RF08 code with code to support an RK8E/RK05 as the system disk
took major bit bumming to fit. Similarly the code to support the
KL8-A four-line serial multiplexer that I wrote was hard to jam in.
There's just no room. Adding the equivalent of the OS/8 USR (which
handles the file systems and takes up memory from 10000 through 11777
in OS/8) would be quite an accomplishment.
silly to ask, but you don't still have the RK05 version, do you?