[Simh] Why the 4004 ney Intel*64 still lives
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 4:29 AM, Timothe Litt l...@ieee.org wrote: I agree that IA is the exception - certainly not on its technical merits, but rather on its inertia. Not inertia - economics. It was a classic HBS (Christensen) style economic disruption where the lesser (worse) technology (x86 vs Vax/68K even MIPS) was useful for a different market (PC/DOS later Winders vs VMS/UNIX etc.) but because that market grew so fast it eclipsed establish technologies that were based on technology that people described as superior. The the new market does care, the lessor technology is good enough for their use and its the new use that gives them an economic incentive for that product to take take off. I remind my peers of this fact all the time. Don't get cocky about how bad xxx (insert your favorite less technology) is. IMO: Economics is a better predictor that technology superiority. i.e. Alpha would have won if that was true :-) So it will be interesting to see if Intel*64 can survive the current attack from low-end. Certainly the wins in the mobile market has allowed that processor to make huge gains and is clearly make the economics of ARM interesting. That said, the lasted European ARM HPC system [Mt. Blanc @ BSC] had a very interesting factoid that came out in the last few days. The team at Rolls-Royce was using Mt. Blanc for their work and discovered: Odroid [ARM] gives ‘cheapest’ run for a single job but Xeon is 27x for 2x the energy cost. Which is what I've been saying locally - as ARM grows up and becomes more like Intel*64, physics tells us that it pretty hard and the ARM designer have to start doing the same things. i.e. if we all learned anything from PDP-10, PDP-11, Vax, 68K etc.. as architectures move up from the low-end and start becoming attractive and adding features (like vectors), they stop looking as much like their low-end fore-fathers and start becoming more like the systems they replaced. But if they new lessor technology can establish a strong enough base when being a lessor technology does matter, you can disrupt the market. Wintel did to the Workstation/Unix, which did it Vax/VMS; the Mini did to the Mainframe etc... Be interesting to watch and be part of the next shift. Clem ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2
FYI: set xq eth1 and then turn off decnet on the install vms system worked like a charm. Amazon seems to be filtering telnet, so we moved the telnet to port 80 and success! For our current needs this will work! Thanks to all. -Bill On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 5:47 PM, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm m...@infocomm.com wrote: OK. Consider this: 1) A standalone vax/vms system won’t usefully need to run DECnet or any cluster stuff. 2) From what you describe you don’t really need to talk between the simh VAX instance and the host centos system. Given these, you can configure the VMS environment to ONLY have an IP network stack and avoid DECnet. This will allow the MAC address of the simulated NIC to retain its default value (as set in the simh configuration file) rather than dynamically changing to a DECnet form MAC address. You should then be able to set the simh configured MAC address to the same MAC address as the centos system’s network interface you are using. Given that, you only need to get an additional IP address for use on the simulated system. I haven’t actually tried this, but it “should” work. -Mark *From:* Bill Deegan [mailto:b...@baddogconsulting.com] *Sent:* Wednesday, July 8, 2015 2:40 PM *To:* Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm *Cc:* bill...@buzz1.com; simh@trailing-edge.com *Subject:* Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2 Trying to run vax/vms under simh on centos (or RHEL) 6.6 Migrating some applications from a physical vax. Minimally be able to Telnet into the system from another system. Maybe ftp in/out. -Bill On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm m...@infocomm.com wrote: Bill, What EXACTLY are you trying to do? What are you trying to do with the VAX/VMS system? What is the host OS the simh instance is running under? -Mark *From:* Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] *On Behalf Of *Bill Deegan *Sent:* Wednesday, July 8, 2015 1:38 PM *To:* bill...@buzz1.com *Cc:* simh@trailing-edge.com *Subject:* Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2 Yup. Correct IP. I ran tcpdump on the network and it's not responding to arp addresses from the MAC address that VMS changes to. -Bill On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 4:07 PM, B Degnan bill...@buzz1.com wrote: Sorry I'd have to mess around with it to find a solution. Forgetting about NAT, confirm you have the correct internal IP first. If you don't use Amazon a lot it's confusing. (was to me). b Original Message From: Bill Deegan b...@baddogconsulting.com Sent: Wednesday, July 8, 2015 4:03 PM To: Cory Smelosky b...@gewt.net Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2 Any examples on how to setup vax/vms in simh for NAT? -Bill On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 7:48 PM, Cory Smelosky b...@gewt.net wrote: Can't work around that, limited to NAT, ec2 does Mac filtering Sent from my iPhone On Jul 5, 2015, at 19:34, Bill Deegan b...@baddogconsulting.com wrote: Greetings, Has anyone had success (or unresolvable failure) getting a simh VAX to run on an ec2 machine? We're following the bridging instructions but running into an issue where the MAC addresses used by the VAX are not routing into EC2 network... Any thoughts/suggestions to get this to work? Thanks, Bill ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Hardware fidelity in the VAX family simulators
On Jul 8, 2015, at 5:39 PM, Bob Supnik b...@supnik.org wrote: First, congratulations to Mark for running the current Ultrix 750 problem to earth. Second, a brief diatribe about the need for fidelity to the hardware in the VAX simulators, which is (on the face of it) lacking outside the 3900 and 780 simulators. I have preached and documented the need for reasonable fidelity to hardware in implementing simulators. The papers on the SImH web site are filled with examples of minute details gumming up software behavior if a simulator gets them wrong. It looks to me like the 750, 730, 8600 are cut-and-paste jobs on the 780, and the MicroVAX I and II on the 3900. I admit there are strong family resemblances and, in some cases, reuse of hardware (the 8600 uses some of the 780 IO adapters), but as Ultrix proved, running VMS is an insufficient proof of correctness. Without reading (and implementing) the gory details of all the system-specific hardware, something is going to break. And if the goal is just to run VMS, why bother with variant models? The 780 and 3900 between them cover the complete history of VAX/VMS, Ultrix, and all the BSD variants. While the 750 now runs Ultrix, will it run the next OS it is given? Even with the current fix, there are multiple errors remaining in the UBA. The 730 won't boot Ultrix off the RB80; and so on. So my challenge to the community is twofold. First, is there more documentation on the variants available somewhere? I haven't found microcode sources or listings for the 750, 730, MicroVAX I, or 8600, for example. Second, are people prepared to adopt a model, read its documentation, and clean it up? End of diatribe. /Bob Let’s not forget different peripheral usage models between the various OSs. I have an open issue where Ultrix 2.0/2.2 run fine on a Microvax II, but as soon as I enable DECnet the system panics with: panic: qe: Non existent memory interrupt Mark, were you able to reproduce this problem with the updated image I pointed you at? John. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Bill Deegan b...@baddogconsulting.com wrote: Amazon seems to be filtering telnet, so we moved the telnet to port 80 and success! EC2 security groups can be set up to allow whatever you want. You need to configure both it and the Centos firewall. BTW, you should probably be using SSH instead of telnet anyway and port 22 is almost certainly open by default. Tom ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] VAX vectors
In article 559e9cca.5050...@supnik.org, Bob Supnik b...@supnik.org writes: Vectors were all the rage at the time (late 80s) because of the success of the so-called minisupers like Convex and Alliant. It was just a flash in the pan, of course; with the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, funding for HPTC dried up for a decade, and all the minisuper and VLIW companies died out. It may have been considered a flash in the pan as far as DEC was concerned, but it certainly had a lasting presence on computing. The simd extensions added to x86 (MMX, SSE, etc.) and other CPU architectures are testimony to the importance of vector oriented processing. -- The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline free book http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline The Computer Graphics Museum http://ComputerGraphicsMuseum.org The Terminals Wiki http://terminals.classiccmp.org Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) http://LegalizeAdulthood.wordpress.com ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
[Simh] VAX vectors
Vectors were all the rage at the time (late 80s) because of the success of the so-called minisupers like Convex and Alliant. It was just a flash in the pan, of course; with the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, funding for HPTC dried up for a decade, and all the minisuper and VLIW companies died out. Both VAX and Prism got vector extensions. The wedging of the vector instructions into the VAX was an interesting problem, because they were supposed to be implemented in both the Rigel-based systems (VAX 6400) and Aquarius (VAX 9000). Rigel's core instruction parsing mechanism was set in silicon, and its microstore was almost filled. I worked out a proposal for Rigel, Tryg Fossum and Dwight Manley did the same for Aquarius, and Dileep Bhandarkar provided architectural cleanup, particularly on exceptions (patent 4949250). The vector instructions take 36 microwords on Rigel. The Rigel vector unit implementation was based on a chip set done by Doug William's Mid-Range systems VLSI team. It consisted of a unique register file chip and a data path chip derived from the Rigel floating point unit. (That design was reused five times: Rigel, Mariah, NVAX, Rigel vectors, EV4.) Vectors were not the only extension to the architecture around that time. A security team worked out a virtualization option that required a handful of new extensions and features. Although the Rigel microcode has decode points for the instructions, no implementation ever made it to silicon. NVAX still has decode points (unimplemented) for the vector instructions, but the decode points for the virtualization proposal are gone. As to Tim's point about covering the VAX's history - quite correct. However, there are no simulators for either the 6400 family or the 9000, and I don't think anyone is prepared to tackle them - certainly not me. Bolting on vectors to the existing 3900 would not be all that hard, because the core floating point routines are available, but it would be another never existed in the real world hybrid. That's already been done once, when the 3900's memory capacity was extended to 512MB, but this is trickier, because the vector option has to be context switched. You'd have to delve into the VMS sources to see how VMS knows about the option, and whether that is tied to specific models like the 6400 and 9000 or is more independent. /Bob ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] VAX vectors
Would anyone mind posting a short assembly snippet of a VAX vector instruction used in context? The only complex instruction I've ever used is the Z-80's LDIR. On Jul 9, 2015, at 12:16 PM, Richard legal...@xmission.com wrote: In article 559e9cca.5050...@supnik.org, Bob Supnik b...@supnik.org writes: Vectors were all the rage at the time (late 80s) because of the success of the so-called minisupers like Convex and Alliant. It was just a flash in the pan, of course; with the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, funding for HPTC dried up for a decade, and all the minisuper and VLIW companies died out. It may have been considered a flash in the pan as far as DEC was concerned, but it certainly had a lasting presence on computing. The simd extensions added to x86 (MMX, SSE, etc.) and other CPU architectures are testimony to the importance of vector oriented processing. -- The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline free book http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline The Computer Graphics Museum http://ComputerGraphicsMuseum.org The Terminals Wiki http://terminals.classiccmp.org Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) http://LegalizeAdulthood.wordpress.com ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2
On 7/9/2015 1:31 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: On 2015-07-09 19:45, BDC wrote: Is there ssh server for vax vms? Yes. Process Software's tcpware includes ssh as far as I can remember. Yes, as does Process Software's MultiNet. Both are available for OpenVMS Hobbyist use. Process Software: OpenVMS Hobbyist Program http://www.process.com/psc/resources/openvms-resource-center/hobbyist/ -- Hunter -- Hunter Goatley, Process Software, http://www.process.com/ goathun...@goatley.com http://hunter.goatley.com/ ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Running simh vax on amazon EC2
Is there ssh server for vax vms? On Jul 9, 2015, at 12:51 PM, Tom Morris tfmor...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 11:07 AM, Bill Deegan b...@baddogconsulting.com wrote: Amazon seems to be filtering telnet, so we moved the telnet to port 80 and success! EC2 security groups can be set up to allow whatever you want. You need to configure both it and the Centos firewall. BTW, you should probably be using SSH instead of telnet anyway and port 22 is almost certainly open by default. Tom ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] VAX vectors
That's amazing stuff. I've tinkered around building simple CPUs from TTL chips (74F series) and what you are talking about is no small feat. You guys that were part of the VAX hardware implementation are incredible. I'm going to have to fiddle with a little VAX assembly just to check it out .. I do have a real 3900 .. On Jul 9, 2015, at 1:34 PM, Johnny Billquist b...@softjar.se wrote: On 2015-07-09 20:26, Eric Smith wrote: Would anyone mind posting a short assembly snippet of a VAX vector instruction used in context? The only complex instruction I've ever used is the Z-80's LDIR. Even plain old VAX instructions can be way more complex than LDIR. :-) There are instructions for polynomial expansion, case instructions, move translated strings, and I can't even remember what else... Johnny On Jul 9, 2015, at 12:16 PM, Richard legal...@xmission.com wrote: In article 559e9cca.5050...@supnik.org, Bob Supnik b...@supnik.org writes: Vectors were all the rage at the time (late 80s) because of the success of the so-called minisupers like Convex and Alliant. It was just a flash in the pan, of course; with the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, funding for HPTC dried up for a decade, and all the minisuper and VLIW companies died out. It may have been considered a flash in the pan as far as DEC was concerned, but it certainly had a lasting presence on computing. The simd extensions added to x86 (MMX, SSE, etc.) and other CPU architectures are testimony to the importance of vector oriented processing. -- The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline free book http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline The Computer Graphics Museum http://ComputerGraphicsMuseum.org The Terminals Wiki http://terminals.classiccmp.org Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) http://LegalizeAdulthood.wordpress.com ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] VAX vectors
On 2015-07-09 20:26, Eric Smith wrote: Would anyone mind posting a short assembly snippet of a VAX vector instruction used in context? The only complex instruction I've ever used is the Z-80's LDIR. Even plain old VAX instructions can be way more complex than LDIR. :-) There are instructions for polynomial expansion, case instructions, move translated strings, and I can't even remember what else... Johnny On Jul 9, 2015, at 12:16 PM, Richard legal...@xmission.com wrote: In article 559e9cca.5050...@supnik.org, Bob Supnik b...@supnik.org writes: Vectors were all the rage at the time (late 80s) because of the success of the so-called minisupers like Convex and Alliant. It was just a flash in the pan, of course; with the end of the Cold War in the early 90s, funding for HPTC dried up for a decade, and all the minisuper and VLIW companies died out. It may have been considered a flash in the pan as far as DEC was concerned, but it certainly had a lasting presence on computing. The simd extensions added to x86 (MMX, SSE, etc.) and other CPU architectures are testimony to the importance of vector oriented processing. -- The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline free book http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline The Computer Graphics Museum http://ComputerGraphicsMuseum.org The Terminals Wiki http://terminals.classiccmp.org Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) http://LegalizeAdulthood.wordpress.com ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Hardware fidelity in the VAX family simulators
On Wed, Jul 8, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Johnny Billquist b...@softjar.se wrote: I haven't found microcode sources or listings for the 750, 730, MicroVAX I, or 8600, for example. FWIW, the 725/730 was somewhat unique in that the micro store was entirely RAM. All of the microcode was loaded by the CFE at power on and none was in ROM. Also, the 730 micro engine was based on industry standard 29xx family bit slice parts. Yep. So, if anyway if anybody does find the sources or development tools for the 730/725 microcode, I'd love to see a copy. I'd love to see it too, just to get an idea of what's really under the hood there. The 11/750 had RAM to store patches to the microcode, but the basic version of the microcode was in ROM. I remember having to keep the microcode patch TU58 installed at some point after 1992 or so, because it would be slurped in when needed. It's not like were moving data over that drive. Where did the 11/725 and 11/730 load their microcode from. Surely not the TU58... Yep. Takes about 20 minutes unless you optimize the files in order of request... then it's about 5 minutes. -ethan ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] VAX vectors
In article 559ebe8a.2010...@softjar.se, Johnny Billquist b...@softjar.se writes: On 2015-07-09 20:26, Eric Smith wrote: Would anyone mind posting a short assembly snippet of a VAX vector instruction used in context? The only complex instruction I've ever used is the Z-80's LDIR. Even plain old VAX instructions can be way more complex than LDIR. :-) There are instructions for polynomial expansion, case instructions, move translated strings, and I can't even remember what else... VAX was pretty much the last CISC-y architecture that sold in any sizable units, AFAIK. x86 has been a CISC-y architecture off-chip that gets translated into a RISC-y architecture in-chip for quite some time now. Lots of instructions are in the slow path and are provided only for backwards compatibility. -- The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline free book http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline The Computer Graphics Museum http://ComputerGraphicsMuseum.org The Terminals Wiki http://terminals.classiccmp.org Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) http://LegalizeAdulthood.wordpress.com ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Hardware fidelity in the VAX family simulators
On 08/07/2015 22:39, Bob Supnik wrote: It looks to me like the 750, 730, 8600 are cut-and-paste jobs on the 780, and the MicroVAX I and II on the 3900. I admit there are strong family resemblances and, in some cases, reuse of hardware (the 8600 uses some of the 780 IO adapters), but as Ultrix proved, running VMS is an insufficient proof of correctness. Without reading (and implementing) the gory details of all the system-specific hardware, something is going to break. Yes, they were. It was the best I could do at the time as I had almost no knowledge of the VAX architecture when I started writing these simulators. My first encounter with a VAX (and VMS) was in 2005 during my university work experience year (although to this day I've never seen a real 730, 750, 8600 or MicroVAX I). The available documentation wasn't always clear about how certain components should work and in these cases the correct functionality had to be inferred from VMS and Ultrix source listings. And if the goal is just to run VMS, why bother with variant models? Because I thought it would be fun and that I might learn something by doing it. Both objectives were achieved. The 780 and 3900 between them cover the complete history of VAX/VMS, Ultrix, and all the BSD variants. Although you do need the VAXstation I or VAXstation II to run VWS. So my challenge to the community is twofold. First, is there more documentation on the variants available somewhere? I haven't found microcode sources or listings for the 750, 730, MicroVAX I, or 8600, for example. Second, are people prepared to adopt a model, read its documentation, and clean it up? I hope so. I never expected them to be 100% perfect but I was hopeful that the community based testing and development would eventually ensure they worked correctly. Matt ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Why the 4004 ney Intel*64 still lives
On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Clem Cole cl...@ccc.com wrote: The the new market does care, the lessor technology is good my apologies ... dyslexia sucks... The new market does not care, the lessor technology is good ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
