Help installing HP 2000 contributed library in simh

[J. David Bryan]

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 18:28, David Williams via cctalk wrote:

> Still have a box of paper tapes from back then that I suspect I'll
> never be able to do anything with again but the pack rat in me refuses
> to let go. Every so often I consider trying to decode them again. 

Assuming that your tapes are sources, there are several folks with 
operational HP 21xx/1000 computers who probably have paper-tape-reading 
capability.  Dumping the tape to a PC-hosted terminal emulator can capture 
the text into a host-PC file, which can then be loaded into the simulator 
via the simulated paper tape reader.  So I wouldn't discard them just yet.

I had retained a stack of 1/2" mag tape dumps of our company RTE system 
holding all of the programs I had written over a period of twenty years or 
so.  A fellow enthusiast in my area (Mike Gemeny) kindly copied them to 
SIMH-compatible tape images, which I was then able to use to recreate our 
company system under simulation.


> That's the old Yahoo group isn't it?

It is.  I think they were migrating from Yahoo to the groups.io site.


> Any other suggestions of interesting operating systems or software to
> try out besides TSB? Interesting development environments or uncommon
> or unusual languages tend to grab my interest.

The RTE (Real-Time Executive) family of operating systems had a long run at 
HP -- from about 1968 through 2005 or so, with a dozen or so variants from 
simple to sophisticated.  Languages supported included the HP assembler, 
FORTRAN IV, ALGOL 60 (partial), BASIC, Fortran 77, and Pascal.  The RTE-II 
software kit on the HP simulator site has the assembler and FORTRAN IV 
compiler preloaded, and it's easy to add the ALGOL compiler from the HP 
software collection on Bitsavers.  Fortran 77 and Pascal required later 
versions of RTE (I intend to get kits posted for these before too long).

Perhaps most interesting to me is a SNOBOL3 interpreter in the HP 
contributed library that ran under the DOS-III operating system.  It was 
written by HP Grenoble, and all of the prompts and error messages were in 
French.  I used it to write a runoff clone way back when.  Still have my 
"SNOBOL3 Primer" by Allen Forte (MIT Press, 1968) sitting on my bookshelf.

                                      -- Dave