DEC VT05 with OS/8 -- basic system rebuild? - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

14 May 2009

Charles H Dickman <chd_1 at nktelco.net> wrote:

...
  Philipp Hachtmann wrote:
  > Hi Charles,
 >
> >> The OS8 Handbook and the documents you mentioned have about all the 
> >> information you should need.
 > But.. I asked here because it's not always easy to actually FIND the 
 > information needed.
 > By the way I did not yet find out how to rebuild OS/8 from scratch 
 > (including reassembly).
 >
 > Philipp
 >  I don't think that I understood the source of your troubles. I think 
 that the basic problem is that most of the OS/8 system did its own 
 thing  with the console. There is no getting around that. 
True, and which I pointed out already at the start of this thread. :-)

...
  I suspect that it is impossible to rebuild OS/8 today.
I would be 
 surprised if OS/8 was actually maintained on a PDP-8. All of the 
 diagnostic listing, for example, were generated using PAL10 on a PDP-10. 
I very much suspect you're wrong.
I also happen to know that atleast some of the software was definitely 
written and maintained on a PDP-8. The reason being that the code was 
converted from PAL-8 to MACREL... And that compiler isn't totally 
compatible with PAL-8, even through it's a superset. And MACREL don't 
even exist on a PDP-10.

Talk with Charles Lasner about it, if you want to hear a really long 
comment about the stupidity of DEC, and the problems it caused (sliding 
towards OS/78 and OS/278 here).

...
  I have tried to find a coherent set of binaries and
this can be 
 difficult too. SET is especially problematical because it requires 
 intimate knowledge of the handler it is going to patch. I have the 
 opinion that the the suggestions about using SET to change things in the 
 KL8-E hander are a red herring, they were probably never added to SET. 
SET is definitely a red herring. If nothing else, than just for the fact 
that the TTY: driver isn't enough by far for this problem.

DEC's solution was the KL8-JA, which did this in hardware. That made it 
work for all occasions, no matter what software, driver or OS you used.

Another solution would be to use the terminal under MULTOS, or something 
similar, since then you actually have a device driver in the bottom, 
which you can fix this in.
(And then it will work for OS/8 as well, although at a slight 
performance penalty sometimes.)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol