Help installing HP 2000 contributed library in simh

David Williams nospam212-cctalk at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 8 13:42:25 CDT 2020


On 2020-04-08 00:26, J. David Bryan via cctalk wrote:
> 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.

They won't be discarded until my kids decide that all this crazy stuff 
they inherited isn't meaningful enough to them to keep around. :)

> 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.

I have some old tapes from my Honeywell 66/60 GCOS days that I sometimes 
wonder if I could still get dumped. No idea what is even on them any 
more. I've brought up the DPS8 emulator with Multics but to be able to 
actually run my old GCOS again would be a dream come true.

> 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.

Ah SNOBOL... I discovered that language shortly before graduating HS and 
always wanted to play around with it but never had an instillation where 
I could. ALGOL as well. Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check some of 
that out too.

Thanks.
David Williams


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