TSS/8 on RK05

[Josh Dersch]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 9:44 AM Lyle Bickley <lbickley at bickleywest.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>

You're very welcome!  Let me know how it goes.  Feel free to submit patches
:).

- Josh



>
> 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
>
> "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
>