Help installing HP 2000 contributed library in simh

[J. David Bryan]

On Wednesday, April 8, 2020 at 13:42, David Williams via cctalk wrote:

> I have some old tapes from my Honeywell 66/60 GCOS days that I
> sometimes wonder if I could still get dumped. 

A number of folks have 800 NRZI/1600 PE/6250 GCR 1.2-inch tape drives 
connected to PCs via SCSI interfaces that can be used to copy physical 
tapes to SIMH tape images.  You might ask on this list to see if someone in 
your area can accommodate you.


> 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. 

The HP Orsay (not Grenoble, as I misremembered) implementation is the only 
SNOBOL3 implementation I've used.  There's a free SNOBOL4 implementation 
here for various PC operating systems:

  https://github.com/spitbol/

Actually, it's a SPITBOL implementation, which is a compiled version of 
SNOBOL4; see:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPITBOL

I've used the Windows NT version for years; it's still my preferred 
language for string manipulation.  Note that SNOBOL3 and SNOBOL4 are 
different syntactically, though learning one certainly would aid in 
learning the other.


> ALGOL as well. Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check some of that out
> too.

If you're not necessarily wedded to the HP 21xx/1000 architecture, the HP 
3000 simulator and its associated MPE operating system kit from the SIMH/HP 
site has a number of languages preinstalled:

  - BASIC (interpreter and compiler)
  - COBOL 68
  - COBOL 74/85
  - FORTRAN 66
  - Pascal
  - RPG
  - SPL

The latter is HP's proprietary Systems Programming Language, an ALGOL-like 
derivative used in lieu of assembler to implement MPE and most of the 
compilers and utilities.

                                      -- Dave