Jerome Fine replies: I have contacted John and he mentioned TASM (from Borland). At one point, I probably had that assembler on an AT, but it was so long ago, the AT died and it probably did not support 386 instructions in any case. As far as I understand the code for EMEM.ASM, it is all very simple 386 type instructions without any macros. There are only 271 lines of code in total with over 100 lines of comments and less than 140 lines of actual code - the rest being directives and subroutine entry points. It is a relatively small program when I consider that it can make more than a GigiByte of Pentium memory available addressed by either byte or 16 bit word. Since the EMEM.ASM file is only 7,148 bytes and the EMEM.DLL file is only 1060 bytes, I doubt that John would consider the EMEM concept anything other than a shell for how to write a DLL for E11. But I don't wish to make the file available in a public manner. What I should be able to do is to take advantage of the considerable CPU power of the Pentium 4 while at the same time writing most of the code for the PDP-11. At the same time, I understand it can never execute on a real DEC PDP-11 mostly due to how long it would take to do anything useful if I write PDP-11 code for the inner loops that will done at very high speed on the Pentium 4. What may be able to really speed things up is if I am able to effectively use the 2 MegaByte L2 cache on the newer Pentium 4 CPUs with a 1066 front side bus (whatever that means). While the work space in EMEM memory will likely be bit a bit map of about 404 MegaBytes, the concept I hope to use may be able to split that into portions that fit into the cache. What I don't know is whether the overhead of repeating each inner loop will be worthwhile. There are about 50 million inner loops. Each inner loop must be executed between about 10 times and about 10 million times. (Maybe now you understand why I estimate a year to execute!) However, when the inner loop is executed less than 1000 times (over VERY widely scattered points in that 404 MegaByte bit map or only about twice per portion which fits into the cache), it seems doubtful there would be sufficient improvement. That seems to leave a small fraction of the inner loops (only about 100,000 of them - which end up using most of the total time in any case which is why splitting the work space into portions which temporarily fit into the cache may be so very useful). Can anyone comment on how much of a speed improvement there might be by modifying the code so that data is accessed via cache rather than from memory? I will locate the assemblers that you suggest and try them! THANK YOU!!! Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.

Hi John, sorry I should have gotten back to you sooner. I have RE'd the 1702 plug-in and captured all the data from the 1702s in my programmer, so the 1702 plug-in is ready to be delivered. In part, I've just been waiting on a day of decent weather to coordinate with you and cycle in to Main St. with it. (phone: 604-469-1888) John Robertson wrote:

In article <4586D7D9.7050508 at ono.com>, sp <spedraja at ono.com> writes: That was me, but I've been informed by my fellow users from the period that it was actually a 2000! Sheesh, I feel stupid :-). I'm still skeptical of this however, I need to find some bona-fide documentation that it was a 2000 and not a 3000, because I swear I remember it being a 3000.... -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <200612181840.kBIIeX69063727 at lots.reanimators.org>, Frank McConnell <fmc at reanimators.org> writes: Well it was my first computing experience, so I'm pretty sure it was a 3000. But given two old timers from my first computing group both said it was a 2000, now I'm on a hunt for documents that will say definitively :-). Until then its my memory vs. their memory. I remember that on the HP we all used a "demo" account. I can't remember if the accounts on the HP were numeric or alphanumeric. There were some accounts where you used user name "demo", password "demo". This was even written on a label attached to the DECwriter IIs that they had :-). On the PDP-11/70, I was 1,20 and 20,8 at different times, depending on whether or not I was granted a priveleged account. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <200612181938.kBIJcV1m064938 at lots.reanimators.org>, Frank McConnell <fmc at reanimators.org> writes: ISTR it was "HELLO". (What I remember most was before the HELLO part you did CR <digit> CR to select a machine from the port selector. After that you were talking to the machine across town from your terminal.) Doesn't sound familiar, but this was 1979 and I was 13 :-). Could it have been "DEMO,DEMO"? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <007701c722d6$5076fef0$6500a8c0 at BILLING>, "Jay West" <jwest at classiccmp.org> writes: What I remember is that it logged you into a timesharing BASIC environment. I remember that the standard library had a set of programs that would teach you BASIC, called TUT01 through TUT25. They were tutorials in the BASIC language. I imagine that this was a standard software library that shipped with all the HP minis of the time. I don't recall anything really about the operating environment beyond that. I only used the HP for a few months before moving over to the 11/70 and using BASIC-PLUS, but the HP is where I taught myself to program with those TUTxx programs. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

It was written... 2000B I guess you mean? That's all definitely from the HP2000 TSB OS. I don't believe you were using 2000B then, as I don't believe 2000B had the group account feature. You've certainly ruled out 2000E by that statement. Jay West

You wrote... The A000 master account being the system library was true for all versions of TSB (2000A, 2000B, 2000C, 2000C', 2000F, 2000F', 2000E, and 2000/Access). However, each OTHER account that ended in 00 being a group library for that range (ie, B100 being a group library for accounts B101 through B199, etc.) was not in all versions of TSB. I know for sure it wasn't in 2000A, 2000B, and 2000E. I know for sure that it was in 2000/Access. I am not sure at all about 2000C, C', or 2000F, F'. Also, at least in 2000/Access, there was an additional mechanism besides GET-$xxx (system library), GET-*xxx (group library), and GET-xxx (local catalog)... if correct capabilities were assigned, you could also do GET-xxx.YZZZ (specify a . and then an account id) to access files in someone elses account regardless of the group you were in. This last method I had completely forgotten about, and references to it in the documentation seem a bit hidden. But it is there. Someone on the list reminded me of this a while back :) Jay

On 19 Dec 2006 at 12:16, Jay West wrote: ...all of which reminds me about the first time I showed a very bright 7 year old girl the Altair 8800 within a couple of years after building it. She said "This is a COMPUTER? (eyes wide)" She went to the terminal and typed: HELLO MY NAME IS AMY. WHAT IS YOUR NAME? CP/M, of course, could make nothing of this. Computer engineers would do well to observe the expectations of small children when designing interfaces. Cheers, Chuck

On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 09:30 -0600, Jay West wrote: Yeah, yeah. I left my good hands at work. <Grin> Indeed. Nah, it's encroaching senility. We *DID* start out with HP 2000B TSB, but they upgraded the computer and OS software at some point... I must be conflating the features. An absolute certainty is that we started with a 2000B. (Note: in both of the references in this paragraph, I have originally typed "200B," and had to go back. *SIGH*) I think they ended up with an HB200F by the time they were done -- but I was long gone, working with Control Data iron by then. (We did not have the kind of organization which made use of Groups, having set everything up with the 2000B...) Thanks for your corrections. This stuff is in the FAR recesses of the old gray matter. Wow... So you're running 2000s w/TSB? That is most cool. Which models do you have?

On 18 Dec 2006 at 19:03, sp wrote: There was a 3000-series HP server on the local Freecycle here last week. I didn't pursue it, because I have no particular use for one. I suspect that this one dates from the 90's, however, given the age of the building it's in. Owner said it was in a 5 ft. rack. Cheers, Chuck