Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Bob Eager]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2016 01:21:44 +0200
Johnny Billquist  wrote:

> On 2016-10-26 21:14, Paul Koning wrote:
> >  
> >> On Oct 23, 2016, at 4:11 PM, Bob Eager  wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 14:07:33 -0400
> >> Paul Koning  wrote:
> >>  
> >>> ...  
> >>  
> >>> RT-11 is very clean.  I've worked with V2A (the FB version when
> >>> possible, SJ when I didn't have enough memory).  They are very
> >>> simple and compact; the UI is the old TOPS-10 style, not the
> >>> newer bloated "DCL" interface.  So a V2 era edition would be a
> >>> good way to go.  
> >>
> >> Yes, it's very nice. Someone once gave me electronic copies of some
> >> sources (circa 1975) and I read them with glee. Lovely comments,
> >> too: the system call dispatcher had the comment "What's it going
> >> to be then, eh?" from the Clockwork Orange. I think those comments
> >> were only in the FB monitor.  
> >
> > Yes.  They were the work of the FB designer, Anton Chernoff, later
> > my mentor in college.  I lifted the idea later on; some of the
> > DECnet/E source code has neat quotes in it.  Unfortunately, those
> > aren't so visible because DECnet/E sources were never
> > distributed... :-(  
> 
> That practice were clearly also around in the software for the PDP-8.
> I remember quite some enjoyment reading about the financial state of
> the Pony Express in the mid 19th century in the FORTRAN-IV runtime
> system.

It prompted me to do the same, particularly in some terminal software I
wrote part of around that time. The commands could be abbreviated as
long as they stayed unique, modelled on my experience of TOPS-10 a bit
earlier.

(the software was called YAROE - Yet Another Rewrite Of Everything)
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-10-26 21:14, Paul Koning wrote:



On Oct 23, 2016, at 4:11 PM, Bob Eager  wrote:

On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 14:07:33 -0400
Paul Koning  wrote:


...



RT-11 is very clean.  I've worked with V2A (the FB version when
possible, SJ when I didn't have enough memory).  They are very simple
and compact; the UI is the old TOPS-10 style, not the newer bloated
"DCL" interface.  So a V2 era edition would be a good way to go.


Yes, it's very nice. Someone once gave me electronic copies of some
sources (circa 1975) and I read them with glee. Lovely comments, too:
the system call dispatcher had the comment "What's it going to be then,
eh?" from the Clockwork Orange. I think those comments were only in the
FB monitor.


Yes.  They were the work of the FB designer, Anton Chernoff, later my mentor in 
college.  I lifted the idea later on; some of the DECnet/E source code has neat 
quotes in it.  Unfortunately, those aren't so visible because DECnet/E sources 
were never distributed... :-(


That practice were clearly also around in the software for the PDP-8. I 
remember quite some enjoyment reading about the financial state of the 
Pony Express in the mid 19th century in the FORTRAN-IV runtime system.


Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist  || "I'm on a bus
  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive! ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-10-26 21:01, Paul Koning wrote:



On Oct 26, 2016, at 2:54 PM, Rich Alderson  
wrote:


From: Ray Jewhurst 
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2016 10:44:05 -0400



I know that RT-11 is under license from Mentec


No, you don't.  Mentec has not existed for many years now.  The remains
of the PDP-11 intellectual property have been in the hands of XX2247 for
several years.


True.


Yup.


Then again, if someone had a Mentec license, that would still be good unless it 
had some expiration clause.


Yup. And I know of places that do have Mentec licenses.


I wonder if the Mentec hobbyist general license letter is still in force.  I 
would assume so unless it has been withdrawn.


That license should still be in effect, but there are more general 
problems with that license, which are a different story that I'm sure 
you know about.


Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist  || "I'm on a bus
  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive! ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Jacob Goense]

Oh, and of course there is Fuzzball, the early IP/TCP and NTP
testbed for the PDP-11 using RT-11 for build and boot. Later
on it ran production timeservers and the first NSFNet backbone.
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[khandy21yo]

There is the Commodore64 OS. Didn't it leave the file system stuff to the disk 
drive?
Is XXDP source available? that would represent a very simple OS.
Cp// was available for several machines, but I wouldn't want to based a new OS 
on it.



Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A
 Original message From: Rich Alderson 
 Date: 10/26/16  1:06 PM  (GMT-07:00) To: 
simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] RT-11 source 
> From: Johnny Billquist 
> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2016 03:11:05 +0200

> In fact, I would probably suggest Ray start with just writing some code 
> to do some simple things without looking at existing code. The first 
> thing needed would be to just have something that can load programs from 
> a device, and run them. This will require some simple device driver, 
> some simple file system, and a simple command line interpreter.
   ^^

That's not even needed.  Beyond a 44 character file id in the VTOC on a disk,
none of the IBM batch operating systems for the System/360 has what we would
call a file system.  OS/360 requires the programmer to know how much space a
file might occupy in its lifetime and allocate that (including overflow areas);
DOS/360 requires the programmer to do all of that, *AND IN ADDITION* to define
the exact location of the file on disk.  I don't think anyone would argue that
those operating systems were unsuccessful in the marketplace.

Just sayin'.

    Rich
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Ethan Dicks]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 4:13 PM, David Holland
 wrote:
> (Not that I can add much to the thread.)   Other than the Minix, and split
> I/D discussion tickled an old memory..
>
> I'd say it depends on the the version of Minix.
>
> My Google Foo Finds these two threads (quickly) WRT Minix & split I/D.
>
> http://www.verycomputer.com/79_f57ba779880523a6_1.htm

Ah... well it seems to matter on the version, but MINIX 1.0 through
1.2 might be small enough to fit.

> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vmsnet.pdp-11/Azzk6fQHmLE
>
> The latter is funny in this context, that thread is only 12 years old.

Indeed.

The mention in one of those threads of a "free 'for-real' C compiler"
is well said.  ISTR the thing that made MINIX possible in the first
place was the Amsterdam C compiler which, for reasons of cost, was not
available to most of the readers of Tanenbaum's book so it wasn't
possible for most of us to recompile from source anyway.  Back in the
1980s, we had a project at work that was based on our other
68000-based products, and the development environment chosen was a
Perkin-Elmer 4-user UNIX workstation in large part because it _came
with a C compiler that emitted M68K object code_ that we then
transmuted into .o files that worked with our in-house assembler to
build the kernel for our product.  The cost of a standalone C
cross-compiler for a "real machine" in 1984 was hideous compared to
the cost of a UNIX workstation that already had a compiler as part of
its necessary tool set.  The world is different today, but I'd still
approach the project of a new UNIX-like OS port to the PDP-11 by
answering the question of what C compiler is going to be used for this
task, and add to that the question of how well does it integrate with
a few percent of PDP-11 assembler source.  Define the toolchain first
and the source kinda falls into place.

-ethan
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 23, 2016, at 4:11 PM, Bob Eager  wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 14:07:33 -0400
> Paul Koning  wrote:
> 
>> ...
> 
>> RT-11 is very clean.  I've worked with V2A (the FB version when
>> possible, SJ when I didn't have enough memory).  They are very simple
>> and compact; the UI is the old TOPS-10 style, not the newer bloated
>> "DCL" interface.  So a V2 era edition would be a good way to go.
> 
> Yes, it's very nice. Someone once gave me electronic copies of some
> sources (circa 1975) and I read them with glee. Lovely comments, too:
> the system call dispatcher had the comment "What's it going to be then,
> eh?" from the Clockwork Orange. I think those comments were only in the
> FB monitor.

Yes.  They were the work of the FB designer, Anton Chernoff, later my mentor in 
college.  I lifted the idea later on; some of the DECnet/E source code has neat 
quotes in it.  Unfortunately, those aren't so visible because DECnet/E sources 
were never distributed... :-(

paul


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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 26, 2016, at 3:06 PM, Rich Alderson  
> wrote:
> 
>> From: Johnny Billquist 
>> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2016 03:11:05 +0200
> 
>> In fact, I would probably suggest Ray start with just writing some code 
>> to do some simple things without looking at existing code. The first 
>> thing needed would be to just have something that can load programs from 
>> a device, and run them. This will require some simple device driver, 
>> some simple file system, and a simple command line interpreter.
>   ^^
> 
> That's not even needed.  Beyond a 44 character file id in the VTOC on a disk,
> none of the IBM batch operating systems for the System/360 has what we would
> call a file system.  OS/360 requires the programmer to know how much space a
> file might occupy in its lifetime and allocate that (including overflow 
> areas);
> DOS/360 requires the programmer to do all of that, *AND IN ADDITION* to define
> the exact location of the file on disk.  I don't think anyone would argue that
> those operating systems were unsuccessful in the marketplace.

That's true.  But since Ray is talking about doing this for educational 
purposes, it would make sense to limit the discussion to reasonably well 
designed operating systems -- which would exclude IBM products from the subject 
space.  Clearly by around 1960 or so, OS designers in many other companies 
understood how to do this sort of thing sanely.

paul


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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Rich Alderson]

> From: Johnny Billquist 
> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2016 03:11:05 +0200

> In fact, I would probably suggest Ray start with just writing some code 
> to do some simple things without looking at existing code. The first 
> thing needed would be to just have something that can load programs from 
> a device, and run them. This will require some simple device driver, 
> some simple file system, and a simple command line interpreter.
   ^^

That's not even needed.  Beyond a 44 character file id in the VTOC on a disk,
none of the IBM batch operating systems for the System/360 has what we would
call a file system.  OS/360 requires the programmer to know how much space a
file might occupy in its lifetime and allocate that (including overflow areas);
DOS/360 requires the programmer to do all of that, *AND IN ADDITION* to define
the exact location of the file on disk.  I don't think anyone would argue that
those operating systems were unsuccessful in the marketplace.

Just sayin'.

Rich
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Ethan Dicks]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 12:55 PM, Al Kossow  wrote:
> Did anyone ever port MINIX to the PDP-11?

I know there's MINIX for the 68000 and SPARC (as of 2.0) and of ARM
(as of 3.0), but I've never heard of MINIX for the PDP-11.  Given that
MINIX 1.0 will run on a 5150-type IBM PC, the utilities and such
should fit into a 64KB address space, but without some digging
wouldn't know if they also depend on split I or not (since that's
"free" on Intel CPUs).

It might be do-able, but wouldn't be done quickly.  I remember more
than a little IBM assembler in the MINIX sources, and I don't recall
how tightly the old stuff is tied to the processor and/or ISA Bus
implementation.

-ethan
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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Paul Koning]

> On Oct 26, 2016, at 2:54 PM, Rich Alderson  
> wrote:
> 
>> From: Ray Jewhurst 
>> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2016 10:44:05 -0400
> 
>> I know that RT-11 is under license from Mentec
> 
> No, you don't.  Mentec has not existed for many years now.  The remains
> of the PDP-11 intellectual property have been in the hands of XX2247 for
> several years.

True.

Then again, if someone had a Mentec license, that would still be good unless it 
had some expiration clause.

I wonder if the Mentec hobbyist general license letter is still in force.  I 
would assume so unless it has been withdrawn.

paul


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Re: [Simh] RT-11 source

[Rich Alderson]

> From: Ray Jewhurst 
> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2016 10:44:05 -0400

> I know that RT-11 is under license from Mentec

No, you don't.  Mentec has not existed for many years now.  The remains
of the PDP-11 intellectual property have been in the hands of XX2247 for
several years.

Rich
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