TSS/8 on RK05

[Lyle Bickley]

Josh,

THANK YOU (!) for the conversion of TSS from RF08 to RK05! I have a PDP-8/E
with and RK05 and it will be fun to get TSS/8 running again.

I had TSS/8 running years ago - on my PDP-12 and RF08 (w/2-disks!).
Unfortunately, I donated both to the CHM in the mid-90's - and they've been
sitting in their archives ever since :( 

Cheers,
Lyle
--

On Mon, 25 Nov 2019 22:03:47 -0800
Josh Dersch via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Hi all --
> 
> We've wanted to run TSS/8 on one of our PDP-8 systems at LCM+L for a long
> time now, and while we contemplated either (a) restoring our RF08 or (b)
> building an RF08 emulator, I decided it might be fun to investigate a third
> option: (c) modify TSS/8 to run off hardware we already have running,
> namely an RK05 drive.
> 
> And it /was/ fun!  And seems to have been successful, as we now have TSS/8
> running on our PDP-8/e.  Performance is acceptable, and it seems to be
> stable so far.  The changes I made are here:
> 
> https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/cpus-pdp8
> 
> This is a fork of a codebase that Brad Parker put together a number of
> years back in which he did some serious work to get TSS/8 to build (amongst
> other things).  I made use of this effort, which saved a lot of time and
> made building/testing my changes quite straightforward.
> 
> I also modified the disk image:  It's extended to 1MW (the maximum possible
> without modifying the filesystem code) and I ported a couple of extra
> programs to TSS/8 (CHEKMO and LISP).
> 
> I figured some people here might also be able to take advantage of being
> able to run TSS/8 from RK05.  I know RK8E's are pretty rare, but I'm also
> guessing more people have them than have working fixed-head disks :).  If
> you do give it a try, let me know if you run into any issues or if you have
> any feature requests.
> 
> Thanks,
> Josh



-- 
73   NM6Y
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
https://bickleywest.com

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