TSS/8 with modern disks? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

19 Sep 2015

there  was a time   I  really  wanted a tss  8  system  to  use and even 
started colleting stuff for it in the  late 70s  but  along  came the  2000 f  
HP  system I bought and I headed  in that  direction..  which  gave be  an 
HP destiny  not  a DEC Destiny.   but   still  ... would love  to  find a  
tss-8 all  together in the racks as  used back then... Ed#

In a message dated 9/19/2015 1:45:44 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time,  
wilson at dbit.com writes:

On Sat,  Sep 19, 2015 at 12:30:13PM -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
...
 When did the 4K user  space(s?) actually swap? Did they
round-robin or swap
based on  activity? I would think they would stay in place until cpu-bound
jobs  reached their time quantum. With only a couple of people on a  32k
machine, it may not even swap that much, depending on what the  users were
running. I'd guess BASIC was pretty big. 
My  understanding is that it's round-robin among runnable jobs, one time
slice  at a time.  I.e. the simplest possible way.  IIRC the monitor  always
takes up two fields (not swappable).  One more field (so, 12 KW  total) is
the minimum necessary to run at all -- SI, FIP, and all the users  can share
that field with frantic enough swapping (which causes a pretty  lights show
on the RF08 panel).  Any more memory than that means less  swapping (or
none), so it's kicking out the LRU job as needed.  I have  a hazy memory
that SI and FIP *only* run in field 2?  Could be  wrong.

BASIC runs in your 4 KW with you.  I've never seen its  sources so I don't
know how clever it is about overlays and/or keeping your  program on disk.
It's a very limited BASIC.  Strings are 6  characters.  Not max -- *always* 
6.
Line #s max out at  2046.

John Wilson
D  Bit