Actually that sounds like a much better idea, then everyone can get it ;) so, if someone wants to "remind" me how to do this, I'd be glad to. it's been eons since I worked on the PDP-11 systems I am assuming I could also use "dump" from my vaxstation (also has a tk-50) to get it? if someone wants to prod me a bit, I'll do an image and post it somewhere everyone can download it Dan. _________________________________________________________________ Discover new ways to stay in touch with Windows Live! Visit the City @ Live today! http://getyourliveid.ca/?icid=LIVEIDENCA006

dd works on tapes, but unless the tape can be recreated from the byte stream, it's not what you want. I'd suggest copytape, myself. It's a way of encapsulating streams of records into streams of bytes, and a program to read tapes and write bytestreams and vice versa. There's a version of it up for anonymous ftp from ftp.rodents.montreal.qc.ca (in /mouseware/local-src/copytape/); I don't know what other versions may be kicking around.... /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Dan Gahlinger wrote: How about giving the people who made simh a copy as a 'historical archive'.

On Tue, 1 Jan 2008, Jason T wrote: OS/2 was written at MICROS~1 by Gordon Letwin. LATER IBM took over rights. Did it have anything to do with Dave Cutler moving from DEC to MICROS~1 to combine OS/2 and some DEC stuff to create NT? world domination NO. It was written to replace MS-DOS. (But it wanted a meg of RAM) IFF you wanted GUI, then you ran "Windows for OS/2" on OS/2. That was later renamed "Presentation Manager" as part of the MICROS~1 effort to make sure that no product had a name that would give you a clue what it was. (Why is the compiler collection called "Visual Studio"? Why is the Virus Transfer Protocol named "Outlook"? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Tue, 1 Jan 2008, madodel wrote: Weren't there also ports of OS/2 and NT for MIPS? For NT, that one seems fairly well-known, but for OS/2 I'm positive it exisited too (at least in vaporware). -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

madodel wrote: I know for a fact there was a MIPS OS/2. Peace... Sridhar

madodel wrote: Nope. It was the IBM OS/2, packaged in with the MIPS off-the-shelf x86 emulation code and running *VERY* slowly on a MIPS Magnum. I know it exists because I have it. The copy I have is clearly labeled IBM Internal Use Only, and it is in my office, which is at an IBM site. Peace... Sridhar

I'm confused about this whole thread. I really thought that there was another entire OS/2 operating system (not from IBM) that people were talking about. The early versions IBM OS/2 ran on the 80286 processor. Later versions required a 386 processor. There was an effort in IBM to put it on PowerPC derived boxes - I know people who worked on that, and was actually jealous that I didn't get on that project. (In retrospect that was not such a bad thing.) How on earth does something like IBM OS/2 ever get ported to a PDP-11? That doesn't seem feasible. I'd have thought that I would have heard of such a thing before this thread. Mike

On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, Jules Richardson wrote: Ah HA! Microsoft used to do some/all? of their development using cross-compilers on PDPs. See Paul Allen's pdpplanet.com If there isn't any more information available yet other than the juxtaposition of "PDP-11" and "OS/2", then perhaps this is a backup tape of development files (maybe even source code?) Or maybe it's just bookkeeping files of resources allocated to the projects.

Why dont ask for the directory/with CRCs or similar and compare with other OS/2 checksums ? Paco On Jan 2, 2008 4:20 PM, Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:

Michael B. Brutman wrote: There was only one OS/2 and that was from IBM, unless you also count the early versions released as Microsoft OS/2. ;-) Some people wonder into the OS/2 Usenet groups thinking it has something to do with MacOS or even Windows 98 Second Edition sometimes. IBM officially killed the publicly available OS/2 line off as of a year ago, but they had been trying to do so since 1995. There is an OEM release based on the last IBM release (4.52) with significant enhancements, called eComStation, which is now at version 1.2 but a 2.0 release is in testing. It is not Open Source and every copy sold requires a license fee to be paid to IBM. It exists primarily to provide support to the many OS/2 based systems that many companies still run because they can't find anything to replace them. IBM did open source the OS/2 JFS source, but that was originally written for AIX, so it was a good fit for porting to Linux. I have an IBM PC Power Series 830 box here with OS/2 for the PPC on it. it will eventually end up in the MARCH computer museum in New Jersey. It boots OS/2, which is neat but there isn't much one can do with it other then look at it. There were a few minor applications ported to it, but there are no printer or network drivers that I have found. Supposedly all the money IBM pored into the Taligent/WorkplaceOS/OS/2 PPC project was one of the reasons leading to the eventual killing off of the OS/2 x86 development. I know there were in reality a lot of reasons for finally pulling the plug, but I wonder how much IBM lost on that project. Good question. That is why I seriously doubt that such a thing existed, but as was pointed out NT was ported to several different platforms including the PPC, Alpha, MIPS and even SPARC from what I have read, so I guess anything is possible. There is Linux on the IBM mainframe now-a-days also. Who would have imagined that a few years ago. There was a rumor for years that IBM had win32 applications running under OS/2 Warp in their labs but never released the feature. Now you can do that to a limited extent using an open source product called Odin, which was based on IBM's original work which was called DAX and Open32. Supposedly IBM never released it because Microsoft kept changing the win32 API making a reliably workable product impossible. They used it instead to port Lotus Smart Suite to OS/2. That was one instance where the rumors were true. Mark -- From the eComStation Desktop of: Mark Dodel Warpstock 2007 - Toronto, Ontario, Canada: http://www.warpstock.org Warpstock Europe - Valkenswaard close to Eindhoven, the Netherlands: http://www.warpstock.eu For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That in it's essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message proposing the Monopoly Investigation, 1938

Antonio Carlini wrote: That was my immediate thought too - the timeframe of OS/2 just seems wrong for a PDP port, hence my questioning whether Dan or anyone *knows* that it's for the PDP platform. (Having said that, some ATM machines in the UK ran OS/2 for years after it was a dead OS elsewhere - it's *possible* that a PDP port was done somewhere along the line for a specific customer/market... it doesn't seem likely, but it is a possibility) Label scan, directory listing, file checksums/contents, details on the history of that particular tape (if known)... it's too early to say anything right now. Very interesting if it really is a PDP port, but I'd say that the odds are against it. (I've been here before with tape media several times - labels are often cryptic, completely 'alien' systems get used to write data, or what looks from a directory listing to be something exciting turns out to be something very boring) cheers J.

jd wrote: Weird. I've certainly seen at least one UK ATM fall over and break out of its program (this was quite a few years ago) - but I'm amazed that anyone would design an ATM in such a way that the keypad buttons were directly readable by the native OS for just that reason. I'd heard that too, but I don't know how much of it's folklore. I suspect these days they all just run MS Windows, and any increase in failure rate is seen to be cheaper to handle than trying to support a 'dead' OS. (Although I'd expect a BSD variant to be more reliable, have a smaller footprint, be equal to Windows in support terms, and lend itself better to the embedded nature of an ATM) Are there any vintage ATM collectors on the list? ;) cheers Jules

Jules Richardson wrote: Considering how naive about physical and electronic security just about everyone was then, I would not be at all surprised. This was at about the time OS/2 first came out and found it's way into industrial equipment, I think. The KISS mentality was still in full effect and hardware design for ATM's still consisted of collecting off-the-shelf components and tossing them together. An ATM would have just one console and that would be the front monitor and keypad, often by default, and the rear monitor and keypad or keyboard, if so equipped, that would require using a hardware or software switch, like those old Inmac KVM-without-the-M switch boxes. Of course, for convenience, it was possible to do stuff from the front keypad, such as use a maintenance menu. Eventually, when ATM design evolved, such convenient features faded into oblivion. If experience is any indication, I would say it's true. Windows is so ubiquitous and people are so accustomed to it breaking that it doesn't seem to matter anymore: They're inured to the pain. Or perhaps numb. Some people would be helpless without the pain, I suppose, even if it saved tons of money to cast the demon out. It's very costly in terms of cost of ownership and lost product. Word was that IBM was going to give or sell some customers what they needed to maintain their copies of OS/2. Since some of their customers have invested a lot in installing OS/2 in their quarter-to-half-million-dollar-plus-plus-plus products, it does not seem likely that they would care to abandon OS/2 for at least a while. Especially not after they got things working so nicely. They would at least want maintenance--bug fixes, etc. Haven't heard since whether IBM actually did give the customers anything. == jd

madodel wrote: No, it was OS/2. Windoze was not used for ATM's at the time. It is possible to get into a shell. Have had to use a mere numeric keypad to get a shell prompt when the keyboard, trackball and touchscreen all quit working. <=Warp3+. btdt. I know that windoze, since NT3.51 and 95, has been put on ATM's. Wasn't at all hard to BSOD them; sometimes just looking cross at them does it. Usually it took a tiny bit more, though. It's nice that it's not following other better OS's into oblivion, then. I'm sure there was much rejoicing. Define "large customers"? Mega OS/2 sales/licenses or mega multinationals or what? == jd Variants on "Name That Tune!": "Name That OS!" and, "Name That Hardware!" using only a portable radio. From Messrs. Corvid & Mustelid, Games, Ltd.

On 05/01/2008, madodel <madodel at ptdprolog.net> wrote: You are very confident for someone asserting that another person has not seen something that they say they have. How can you know? Lots of ATMs & other bank financial systems ran OS/2. I have watched staff at 2 of the banks I deal with routinely - the Woolwich Building Society (now owned by Barclays) and Nationwide Building Society working with OS/2 systems in the last year. I, too, have also encountered crashed ATMs which have dropped to an OS/2 command prompt, several times. I used to be an OS/2 user myself; that [C:\] prompt is very distinctive. On at least one, the keypad did still generate numbers, too; alas, I had no Alt key, or I could have entered ASCII, very slowly, and who knows, given long enough, maybe worked out how to persuade the thing to empty its cash drawers for me. :?) But with no Alt and no Enter, there's not much you can do except type numbers. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com ? MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk ? Skype: liamproven ? ICQ: 73187508

On Sun, 6 Jan 2008, madodel wrote: You're certainly welcome to doubt whether he was right, and/or think that he was mistaken. But we rarely put up a "burden of proof". "IF . . . had known what they were doing" I don't doubt that you could write some extraordinarily robust code. But, do you assert that Diebold knows what they are doing? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred

Does anyone on the list have a pair of 720k, 3.5 inch drives they'd like to part with? I stole a pair of drives from my Amiga 2000 for my Ampro, but I need two more for the H-89. :) tnx! g. -- Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007 http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.

It seems clear that when Diebold programs the machines, failures need not be blamed on OS/2.

Fred Cisin wrote: It's nigh impossible to provide proof, evidence, etc., when one has "eyes only" access, not even carrying a camera around, "just in case". For ATM's at least, no one's going to let you have anything as proof. If anyone feels otherwise I am sure the FBI would certainly be happy to assist in disabusing such silly notions. In defense of programmers, whether or not the programmer(s) failed to do an adequate job depends far more on their employer's policies and schedules than on the programmers' skill and experience. Mostly, companies seem to go with whatever works, even if it isn't perfect, or have a non-technical management type dictate precisely and strictly what a programmer is to do, regardless of the potential consequences. Or, rather, that /was/ a common policy. It's only slightly improved, though, in all the years since. == jd

At 10:32 AM 1/7/2008, madodel wrote: Hmm. There are 140,000 photos that match ("crashed" or "ATM"). Not quite the same meaning. I was once in a warehouse of dead ATMs and scrapped ATM boards, and I was somewhat surprised to see they used laptop hard drives. - John

The latter doesn't work - or at least, it didn't a while ago. I was searching for some music typesetting software called "SMUT". I'm sure you can imagine the false positives; I started adding terms like -pussy -beaver to my search to try to suppress them, which simply didn't work. And when I reported it to Google, did they fix their bug? No; they added "typesetting" to the list of search targets that suppressed the pr0n page hits when searching for "smut" (apparently regardless of the search including terms explicitly incidating that the seeker does not want them). They didn't seem to grasp the idea of actually obeying the user's stop words, presumably preferring to make users write to the directly to be able to find what they're looking for. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

just hack it to do a screen print to the built-in printer :-) On Mon, 7 Jan 2008, madodel wrote: a friend who used to work for them says that their ATM work has lower quality control standards than their voting machines I might have a lead on a Diebold "debugging keyboard"

On Mon, 7 Jan 2008, Andrew Burton wrote: If your banks switch to Diebold, then you might get a lot more chances to see one :-)

I personally have seen cash machines crash that were using OS/2 (a very long time ago) it used to be every cash machine in the city I live in ran on OS/2, it was a "staple" I thought this was widely known. and yes, they crashed. I miss those screens. But I'd know an OS/2 screen anywhere. there were rumors that IBM was going to open source OS/2, but not sure what came of it, if anything. anyhow, I just got back from vacation so I'm looking for the tape, etc now. may take a while. I might even have to rebuild my vax and tape drive. yippy! Dan. ---------------------------------------- _________________________________________________________________

I fail to see what Windows NT has to do with anything. OS/2 was originally 16-bit, and ran on the 80286. I believe the first version or two of Windows NT shipped with x86, Alpha, PPC, and MIPS hardware support (at least I think those were the 4 listed architectures). Somewhere I should have a box that says it supports all 4. in Decmember of 1987. This pretty much agree's with what I remember from that timeframe. As V1.0 was text based, and 16-bit, it is possible that a PDP-11 port could have existed. Please note, I am not saying that this is OS/2 for the PDP-11, just that such a port would have been possible in that time frame. I can't see why such a port would have been done. On a related note oddly enough at least a partial port of CP/M-68k to the MicroVAX 2000 exists. I believe one of the list members is the one that has done it. Zane

Guy Sotomayor wrote: That is what I thought. Thanks for the clarification. Its amazing though how OS/2 PPC looks and feels just like Warp3. Its a shame it was never finished, but seeing the following I understand why IBM decided to pull the plug. And that was back when a billion dollars was worth something. This is more than I had heard before, but I suppose it depends on what people consider included in the development and from when. Wasn't Taligent started to work on that project? OS/2 PPC is still an amazing piece of work. Mark -- From the eComStation Desktop of: Mark Dodel Warpstock 2007 - Toronto, Ontario, Canada: http://www.warpstock.org Warpstock Europe - Valkenswaard close to Eindhoven, the Netherlands: http://www.warpstock.eu For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That in it's essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message proposing the Monopoly Investigation, 1938

Non-commercial of course. :^) This was done in the last 2-3 years. I forget who buy, but I do remember they suffered a setback when their developement system failured. I didn't pay to much attention, as while I have a MicroVAX 2000, it was only partially functional last time I messed with it. It could format a HD, but had bad memory. Zane

madodel wrote: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Be careful with statements like that. They can come back to bite you. Peace... Sridhar

madodel wrote: I'm not saying that there was. I'm saying that there is a fairly good chance of someone at some point in recorded history calling *something* OS/2, and it not having to do with IBM. It might have even been something from the 1920s or something not having anything to do with computers. Using absolutes like "only" and "never" can be dangerous. Peace... Sridhar

On Wed, 2 Jan 2008, John Foust wrote: Don't forget that the OS/8 variant for the DECmate II was called OS/278 (because the DECmate II was called the PC-278). -- roger ivie rivie at ridgenet.net

Hi: Are you near this tape? Can you give more information? Today is Jan 15... Paco On Jan 3, 2008 5:06 PM, Dan Gahlinger <dgahling at hotmail.com> wrote:

Fred Cisin wrote: David Both wrote the original documentation for the IBM PC on the first PC off the assembly line. Everyone has their own agenda, but I would think that Letwin was far more invested in M4FT then Both was in IBM, though David was from a time when IBM employees were said to bleed blue. No but I believe a lot of people assume that Microsoft took all the code they had been working on and used it as the base for the initial cut of NT. The Cutler story is a nice diversion to pretend that it was written from scratch and was as bullet proof as VMS, but seriously considering the actual results I really doubt it. Considering Microsoft's history of stealing just about everything they had ever done, why would you think otherwise in the case of NT? There is just some OS/2 text mode support code in NT 3.51. And certain errors result in OS/2 error messages which is a bit disconcerting when they popup. I have no idea what may have been in the very early versions of Micosoft's 32bit windoze. Fine with me, site a reference that lists a PDP-11 port of OS/2. You mean like releasing the first version of NT as Windows NT 3.1 when there was never a 1.0 or 2.0 or even a 3.0 release? Of course a name can't make up for it still being beta level code. But then IBM did the same with its PPC release of OS/2 and the OS/2 1.0 release had some serious issues as well. There was some sort of deal between m$ft and Apple back then. Not sure what the time frame for what you cite is, but back in 1995-1996 timeframe when Apple abandoned Taligent and WorkplaceOS, they also killed off development of Quicktime for OS/2 just before it was to be released, citing that they needed to save money, yet the project was entirely funded by IBM. I seem to recall that m$ft made a large investment in AAPL at about the same time, but I might be off by a few years. Mark -- From the eComStation Desktop of: Mark Dodel Warpstock 2007 - Toronto, Ontario, Canada: http://www.warpstock.org Warpstock Europe - Valkenswaard close to Eindhoven, the Netherlands: http://www.warpstock.eu For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That in it's essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Message proposing the Monopoly Investigation, 1938

At 5:18 PM -0800 1/1/08, Fred Cisin wrote: Another problem with the OS/2 V3 statement is that Microsoft was last involved with V1.2, V1.3 and forward were IBM's work. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft was involved in V2, and it wasn't until V2.1 that the OS was really good. I was a big OS/2 fan from '91-95, though at the beginning of '92 I started using Linux. I switched to the Mac in '95, though have continued to use Linux and Unix as well. I added VMS to the mix at home in '98. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 15:09 -0800, Fred Cisin wrote: I have in my possession a 3.5" DD floppy disk with the source code of an OS/2 operating system for 8086 PCs. It wasn't the same OS/2 as IBM had. It predates it by many years, I suspect. Just because it's got a picture of a baby on the label, doesn't mean the can has babies in it. Gordon

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Dan Gahlinger wrote: And we wish that you would not say "RE: offer - OS/2 for the PDP-11" if it is your intent that you "never said it was os/2 for PDP". But, disunirregardless of that, intellectual property does not automagically become public domain, no matter how thoroughly it was "abandoned". Legally, In USA and Canada, it would not even count as a "good faith effort" to find the owner unless you also contacted all surviving relatives.

On 15 Jan 2009 at 22:26, Dan Gahlinger wrote: I'm confused. Does the tape contain the source code for IBM OS/2? If so, it's pretty clear who holds the rights, isn't it? Just not following the drift of the conversation, sorry for my denseness. Cheers, Chuck

At 5:47 AM -0500 1/16/09, Sridhar Ayengar wrote: One thing I'd like to know is why this thread was resurrected after just over a year. On that note, I believe the consensus a year ago was that someone probably backed up their OS/2 install onto a TK50. Zane -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet) | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Patrick Finnegan wrote: Yes, it was my fault. I thought that it was an ideal example of ownership of intellectual property not being an issue of possession nor lack of knowledge of the whereabouts of the author in the "abandonware" thread. Sorry, -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Friday 16 January 2009, Jim Scheef wrote: Or better yet, maybe the thread could just die. Pat -- Purdue University Research Computing --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org