I am interested too, having had several pick systems go through my hands. Paxton Astoria, OR On 4/15/06, Doc Shipley <doc at mdrconsult.com> wrote: -- Paxton Hoag Astoria, OR USA

On Sat, 15 Apr 2006, Doc Shipley wrote: It's been fun reading. I even [unsuccessfully] looked for my old Pick books. (prob'ly long gone) There was one from the "Pocket Guide" series called "The Pick Pocket Guide"! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

Thanks Doc - and everyone else who has responded positively. I too am of this opinion - I find the threads where someone is actually working with a classic system to be most interesting, and in my mind more on-topic than many other threads which pass through unchallenged. I doubt this will go on that much longer, as I am getting "on my feet" with the machine now... But if anyone finds my reports and questions objectionable, let me know and I'll take it off-list. Took the tape drive out this evening and gave it a good cleaning ... It's an Archive Model 5945C, which is a QIC02 60M drive that uses DC600A tapes (I've got lots of tapes for it). A note in the operations manual says if you do a binary (image) backup of a drive much more than 30M you will need multiple tapes - which sounds about right... Anyway, popped in a DC600A and told the Diagnostic monitor to write a Full image of the drive - and it's happily whirr... whirr... whirr..ing away as I type - I have the feeling it will take a while.... The operations manual also documents a SYS-GEN command for building a SYSGEN tape from the running system, and also a file oriented system backup (instead of the Image) procedure ... If all goes well, I will perform these procedures in turn, and then make a second set of them all. Hints on how to get the system to read the entire tape without actually restoring anything to the hard-drive would be most welcome... This is proving to be quite an interesting system (discovered another password protected "higher level" monitor accessable the system configuration block which is stored on the hard drive) - fortunately the password to this one is "fixed" and is mentioned in the operations manual. The documents I have are fairly thin, but they do have a lot of the information I have needed - I may scan them an post them with the machine when I put it on the web site. Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html

Dave Dunfield wrote: try doing a "POVF" and reporting what is there. Also type "WHAT" pick free space is called overflow, because when you create a database file in pick, you create a base block sized to have a number of hash buckets, and once these fill up the system adds in "overflow" to contain more data. this makes for a double edged sword. If you guess and size the file right, you end up with the first frame being read in and having your data. if you goof, the ssytem will search down the chains of frames till it finds it. as time goes on the files get worse and worse. restoreing If you have a DC600, you may have 45mb or 60mb of data / tape. if you get the what info, we can figure out if you have written enough tapes to equal your disk size. another command to use is "WHERE" which will tell you about all the users logged on. Unless the adds is set up for modem control, you can just move your terminal from port to port and log in. I can give you some basic program stuff to try once you get a user account created to play on. Use CREATE-ACCOUNT if there is no indication of a menu with such utilities in it. Pick had no consistent menus to assist in these administrative tasks, but vendors such as Adds added them, and enhanced them. LISTU will show who is supposed to be logged on, whereas where is like a unix PS command. as another warning, there is a 3 or 4 stroke kill the system permanently at the ! sign, depending on your bad luck. when you get the ! you are getting a frame number before the period, and an offset in the frame after it. So 6.123 shows that the program pointer was in frame 6 (TERMIO) and at offset 123. If you happen to type a . then a valid hex number, it may store that directly into frame 6 at 123, yeilding a bad user experence. That is why I want you to get to a sys1 or sys0 Dave account asap. That little feature is disabled. I'm glad you broke into it, it would have been difficult but not impossible (danger of above) to break into the system otherwise. The system really is not that insecure, as there was and is the issue of how secure a software system can be without the encryption that is integrated into laptops today, if you have physical access to the machine. And the only place the exploit you pulled can happen is on the console, so if you secured the console and the connection and the machine, you were okay. and it was not feasible to be more secure as in encyrpting everything back then. when you get a Dave account ttry the following Hello world program CREATE-FILE MYBP ED MYBP HELLO (prompt is a .) I<cr> (insert) 001 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 002 END 003 <cr> (numbers supplied by editor) .FI<cr> (file it) **** [nnn] PROGRAM MYBP COMPILED (os some sort of rendition of the above) HELLO WORLD if the above works, you are cooking. of course the > is the TCL prompt. I used MYBP because frequently one shared a BP (basic program) file with several accounts, and used subroutines I am glad all of you seem to be okay with this, I was offering to shut up if not. Sounds like we need to get a pick machine up somewhere for all to play on :-) Jim

On Sunday 16 April 2006 04:07 am, Philip Pemberton wrote: What's OS/A65? -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

On Sunday 16 April 2006 01:53 pm, Philip Pemberton wrote: Nifty! :-) -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin

Dave Dunfield wrote: you have 512K system which is a fairly large system. you have 8 active ports. 9 processes, 1 / port, 1 for the print spooler process 768 PCB0 means you have 768 abs frames, which contain the system code. PCB's. Picks virtual architecture requres at any time a PCB, code to execute in any give ABS frame, and a monitor construct called a PIB. there is only one PIB / process, but there is a main PCB for the code to run in, and a special PCB for each process to run the debugger context in. the system file is laid down at 4485 and has 27 base frames (modulo = 1) a Maxfid of 74623 implies a 75mb disk if the frame sicze is 1024 and 35mb if it is 512. you have therefore got about 1/3 your space free. if you can dump a frame, say the first frame of the system frame we can infer from that dump what the frame size is. IIRC "DUMP 4485 (X" will give a hex dump. if it goes to 512, then we have 512 byte frames and the total system size id 74523 is multiplied by 512 to give the above estimate of 35mb, etc. Pick systems have been implemented with up to 4096 byte frames. more on the frames later. the reason for mentioning securing the console or port 0, is that the system always boots up on that. therefore there are never any spurious breaks to annoy you. once the system releases the other lines to run and accept logons, they dont get the spooler startup window, they all just get LOGON PLEASE, which does not have the hole (in theory) BTW, the behaviour of hanging your console with a break probably is due to the fact that you can do break while in the kernel. before the system goes "virtual" and runs the other lines and allows logins, all the async I/O is done by the kernal, and is frequently not designed by the kernel coders to be tolerant of breaks. just a fact of life with what pick systems did. the open sys2 accounts are inexcusible. that is just sloppy system administration. one of the things that pick did was to turn people who usually had adding machines next to their desks into system administrators, and as you will find programmers. This lead to some leaps in what you could expect in skills with the site that ran pick. It is worse than now because there was no way to point to examples of how things like these accounts could bite you so even if our documentaiton and training said to get rid of them, there was always some guy who figured if the acocunts were unknown, noone would log into them. it gets worse from there. I am thinking that maybe you need SYS1 privileges to create files. I suspect that DAVE got created with SYS0. on SYSPROG try the following: CT SYSTEM DAVE that will show us what the account can do. if there is a SYS0, we can try an edit of the dictionary, but that may be prevented. some pick systems tried to put in protections on editing the system dictionary as a reliability factor. I am not that familiar with ADDS and it may take a utility to modify the account. if you can do the following we can get some more info on the system utilities. If it isn't too long, do the following: on SYSPROG LIST BP LISTVERBS and publish that. It will give hints about the system utilites names. if that turns out to be to long, see where Jay can put it out of line so we don't have a huge junk message. I don't have a system to try this on, sorry. CREATE-FILE MYBP 1,1 17,1 need dictionay and data section sizes. I would never let SYSPROG be available on the net. I would rather have an R83 system online which could be restored than have a classic that could not. I guess at some time we should poke inside and see if the disk is a common one, and maybe you can do a swap and restore your backups. then we will have it made about keeping it running. I would never do a restore on the physical disk you have unless it forces you to. so the best approach will to be to try to find an identical one somewhere and put it in to try the restore on.

Gordon JC Pearce wrote: how many would you like pointers to? There is a lot of Pick programming out there and the users and sometimes the programmers are not even aware of it. Jay pointed out at least one open source version that will allow one to do a lot of the pick functions, though hosted by linux, as is the norm now days. Jim