Jerome Fine replies: As far as I remember, Lyle received a system from S&H which he was able to somewhat (perhaps mostly) recover along with hard copy documentation. Does anyone have any contact with Lyle or did Lyle share any of this information on TSX-PLUS? Since I purchased a TSX-PLUS license over 10 years ago, I am legally able to run the software and have the latest distribution. It sounded like S&H gave Lyle permission to share distributions and documentation with hobby users wishing to run TSX-PLUS for non-commercial purposes. Can anyone confirm this? If so, then I would be able to share my distributions and documentation. I could also make up a hobby distribution from a distributor's release if that is preferred. An OBJ file is used to hold the copyright notice and user information which is then incorporated into one of the distribution OBJs. I remember having to do all of that when I upgraded a customer to V6.5 of TSX-PLUS after some locally required modifications were made to the resident monitor which had been part of the earlier version. I presume, Gordon, that you have the documentation for the V6.5 release? I have V6.5 as well as several sets from previous releases. The OBJ files can be UNMACed and converted to MAC files, but the DECUS release of UNMAC was not able to do the conversion without extensive enhancements. The primary problem was that the number of GLOBAL symbols far exceeded the capacity of the DECUS version of UNMAC. By the way, if anyone is running TSX-PLUS under Ersatz-11, the HD: disk drive provides an incredible alternative to VMX.SYS and frees up the use of the (emulated of course) PDP-11 memory. The version which I use under RT11XM will likely run as is under TSX-PLUS. Under RT11XM, the HDX.SYS is 3 times as fast as VMX.SYS, uses substantially less LOADed code and even the minimum version supports a full 65536 blocks. NOTE that under TSX-PLUS, the device driver name VM.TSX might not be allowed since I seem to remember that the VM: device was built into TSX-PLUS, but it has been a very long time and there may be a very separate VM.TSX file used - in which case: COPY HDX.SYS VM.SYS SET VM NAME,UNIT=e11 physical unit RENAME VM.SYS VM.TSX and you might be all set (until a bug is discovered) since there has been no testing under TSX-PLUS. I can probably be persuaded to test under TSX-PLUS if that become necessary. 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.

On Sunday 30 September 2007 15:58, Gordon JC Pearce wrote: I'm back in CCTECH as opposed to CCTECH - see below. Two reasons I went "silent". First, I've been absolutely swamped businesswise. That's both good and bad when you're a consultant. Good because you're getting $ and bad because your hobby life goes away. Second - and equally important - I wanted us to have a different license for TSX-Plus. As originally agreed to by S&H, I needed to track "who" had TSX-Plus and had agreed to the personal license. The idea was to make sure that current commercial users (primarily gov) of TSX-Plus did not download the personal version and use it commercially - without any tracking. The primary reason - I wanted personal users to have unlimited use; i.e., multiple system capability - so if you owned 10 PDP-11's capable of running TSX-Plus you could run them without violating the single user software or license restrictions. It turned out that the only practical way to set this up was to have a "free" store, where one would agree to the license and then be able to download a multisystem version of TSX-Plus. That individual could NOT transfer the license nor could they give away a copy to anyone else. At first it seemed O.K. to me. But in actually, it had a serious flaw - a single point of failure. Whoever owned the website housing the TSX-Plus "store" could go away for any one of a number of reasons - and the hobbiest community would be stuck w/o a legal source of TSX-Plus. As a result, I have worked with S&H to create a new, more liberal license agreement - just in the last two weeks. It is still not "open source" - but it is modeled after the "Apache license". Essentially, the license will be included with the zipped binaries, docs, etc. It requires that the license be included (zipped) with every distributed copy of the binaries or documentation. The license includes TSX-Plus (Version 6.5), COBOL and RTSORT binaries and documentation in PDF form. I plan to put everything up on one of my websites - and also, as time permits - add summaries of the many lessons I've learned in configuring and running TSX-Plus on Unibus and QBus systems. I also will provide reasonable free "support" for personal use as time permits - probably by developing an FAQ for TSX-Plus (help from others desireable). With the new license, anyone will be able to distribute TSX-Plus as long as it includes the license agreement. I got really frustrated with the massive quantity of "off topic" crap on CCTALK and unsubscribed. I recently subscribed to CCTECH. Sorry for the miscommunication, Gordon. I did ping you several times - and didn't hear from you. I suspect it was because you got busy. Perhaps when you were freed up I got busy... Regards, Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. Mountain View, CA http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"