Help installing HP 2000 contributed library in simh

[J. David Bryan]

On Tuesday, April 7, 2020 at 13:19, David Williams via cctech wrote:

> First I want to say again how much I appreciate your assistance.

You're very welcome.


> Up until now my only experience with this system was as a HS student
> first learning to program and never had any access to the system
> outside of that. Learning a lot reading the manuals for the system as
> well as the doc on Simh and from you.

Prior to SIMH, my experience with TSB had been limited to running an HP 
contributed library program, "HP 2000F BASIC FOR DOS-M/DOS III," on an HP 
1000 M-Series running DOS-III (circa 1975).  Only with simulation have I 
been able to expand my experience, both as a user and as a sysop, to 
include running the C-prime, E, F, and Access versions of TSB.


> Looking at the Access doc on the conversion program's dump command I 
> noticed it says it dumps 2000/Access "BASIC formatted files" which the 
> one file I was able to transfer is where the others are not.

Oops.


> Looking through the manuals to see if there is a different way to save 
> the programs that could work but don't see anything yet.

I had wondered.  HP BASICs store their programs in transliterated form, 
i.e., substituting table index numbers for statement keywords, operators, 
etc.  So, for example, a "10 PRINT" statement gets stored internally as two 
integers -- the line number, and an index into the keyword table.  A "LIST" 
command reconstructs the text representation from the internal form.

So were you to load a program into 2000F that uses an Access feature, the 
stored statement keyword index would be beyond the end of the 2000F table.  
Running or listing that program would then either fail (best case) or send 
the interpreter into the weeds (probable case).  That's the origin of the 
feature code comparison and the warning that if you proceed with the load, 
you take responsibility for the cleanup.


> Haven't looked into punch tape with Simh, is that working?

The system paper tape reader and punch (simulator devices PTR and PTP) work 
under Access.  You can use the Access PUNCH command with the "OUT=" 
redirection option to output to the system punch device; the result is a 
plain-text file listing of your program, albeit with a bunch of NULs for 
tape leader and trailer.

You could do almost the same thing by listing your program to the system 
line printer; this results in a plain-text file, with some extra blank 
lines to divide the output into pages.

Unfortunately, while 2000F has a working system tape reader, TSB does not 
provide a way for users to read programs from it.  It's used only for 
bootstrapping the system.

Both Access and F allow the user to input programs by using the paper tape 
reader that's part of the ASR 33 Teletype.  But the simulated terminal 
multiplexer supports only KSR 33 models (no punch or reader).


> Not sure punching each program and reloading into the 2000F would be
> any better than copy/paste though.

Depending on your host system and Telnet client, you should be able to copy 
an entire text file and paste it into a logged-in TSB session terminal 
emulator in a single operation.  It's not necessary to copy-and-paste each 
line.  So it shouldn't be too difficult to employ this method -- maybe just 
tedious.

2000F provide the TAPE and KEY commands to suppress and then re-enable any 
diagnostic messages generated by the intervening program input.  They may 
be useful if the programs you're pasting might have Access-only features 
that would cause errors when entered.


> Open to any other ideas for getting a bunch of programs back to a 2000F 
> system...

There's an HP 2000 users' group at:

  https://groups.io/g/hp2000family

They might have some additional ideas or know where to locate a compatible 
CSL tape.

                                      -- Dave