Re: [Simh] Cross Compilers (and memories thereof)

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Let's move this to a new thread subject of its own !

On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 12:04 PM, Davis Johnson  wrote 
(under old subject Re: [Simh] Interdata OS/32: hello-world in CAL32) :

> One that I remember was TI had a 9900 cross assembler written in FORTRAN (all 
> caps in those days). It was free to educational institutions.
> I talked a prof. into requesting it, but the available FORTRAN compiler 
> didn't like it.

Another now-defunct company, Microtec Research Incorporated (purchased by 
Mentor Graphics in late 1995), definitely had a TI9900 cross assembler written 
in FORTRAN from 1983.  We had the source code under license and compiled it 
under VAX/VMS (complete with CLI switches), and with a few custom tweaks, it 
was largely compatible with SDSMAC that ran on TI's 990 computer systems (now 
simulated via Dave Pitts' SIM990).  There was also a linker/loader that 
produced Tektronix HEX output (similar to TI's SDSLNK) as the final executable. 
 I was able to modify the code enough to get it to compile under OpenWatcom's 
Fortran 77 on Windows XP.





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Re: [Simh] Interdata OS/32: hello-world in CAL32

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On Feb 23, 2016, an anonymous user (li...@openmailbox.org) wrote:

> Thanks very much for the additional info. Your post was very timely since I 
> read in the notes that come with the PL/M cross compiler
> that is being discussed that it was a cross-compiler hosted on MTS and VM/CMS.

> I don't think I ever came across a cross compiler in the old days. It is 
> interesting to see that people used these odd combinations.

> I wonder if we should start trying to archive and document cross compilers 
> specifically.

> On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 01:01:28 -0500
> johns...@gregjohnson.org wrote:

> [very nice story snipped]

Cross compilers were great when your target system didn't have enough memory, 
storage, and possibly no actual operating system to support a locally-hosted 
compiler.  For a language like PL/M-86 which had no language specific I/O 
constructs beyond reading to and writing from I/O ports on the target CPU, it 
was perfect for writing applications for an OS-less embedded systems, but it 
needed a host.  Hosting on a VAX under VMS might be viewed as a little extreme 
when the target had less than 64K of EPROM and a few K of RAM, but it worked.  
The only complaint I had is that Intel limited the symbol table sizes somewhere 
in the linker (IIRC !), and you could exceed the maximum number of external 
symbols, thus requiring some splitting of modules and multi-step linking to 
resolve this dilemma.  I suspect the origins of this limitation was the MS-DOS 
environment with 640K of memory (Intel's tools didn't use a DOS extender), and 
that whoever ported the toolset to VAX/VMS never increased this limitation, 
even though VAX/VMS could support a lot more than virtual memory than DOS.

Assemblers were a little bit easier to host on a target - smaller code size in 
your editor, no optimization required, etc., though plenty of cross assemblers 
certainly existed for a wide range of targets, especially those that were 
embedded like Intel 8048 & 8051, Motorola 680x, etc.

A lot of the "classic" embedded cross compiler/cross assembler companies are no 
longer in existence, either gobbled up by larger companies, or simply going the 
way of the Dodo bird.  Names like Franklin, 2500AD, Avocet System, Adtek (from 
Japan) and Hi-Tech (from Queensland Australia), were pretty common players, but 
these days their products are no longer available, or if you're lucky they are 
end-of-life and provided as-is with no support, even if you buy them.  Intel 
created their own systems, like the Intel's iPDS-100 running ISIS-II, or 
Motorola/Freescale (now NXP) got 3rd party vendors like P Micro to do some of 
their tools and development boards.  It was a wild time !!!

PS: I'd love to see an iPDS-100 emulation in SIMH one day !!!


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Re: [Simh] Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities source code

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

The PL/M compiler for CP/M was for 8080/8085/Z80 target, i.e. PL/M-80.

Intel did a lot of work to adapt PL/M for iAPX-86 processors 
(8086/8088/80186/80188 variants) and added support for the segmented memory 
architecture amongst other changes.  The last DOS version I had was V3.4 from 
1987.  There was a UDI shim that mapped Intel's own style of I/O calls to the 
underlying DOS equivalents.

On the VAX/VMS side, we also had Intel's PL/M-86 V3.4 from circa 1989 - that's 
when we got the MicroVAX 2000 that it was hosted on.  I learned to love loading 
MicroVMS 4.5B from a set of 50-ish floppy disks onto the RD54 system disk, and 
then installing the Intel tools from TK50 tapes.

When we switched from VAX to Alphas running OpenVMS 6.2-1H3 in the late 1990s, 
we simply DECmigrated the Intel tools and the translated EXEs ran perfectly 
fine.  Thanks to DEC for solving that problem for us !


On Mon, Feb 22, 2016, Kevin Handy khandy2...@gmail.com wrote:

> A deeper look at the site "http://www.cpm.z80.de/; shows other PL/M sources, 
> such as a "VAX PL/M", ans a PL/M to C translator.

> The "Unofficial CP/M web site" has a PL/M compiler. I don't know if it's 
> close to anything you're looking for.  it'S  listed with the following 
> description
> Here is the source to the Intel PLM compiler. It is written in Fortran (66), 
> and is supposed to be pretty clean.
> It compiles correctly with gcc's g77 on Linux. However, it is not the version 
> required to compile CP/M 2.2 or 3.0. It works well, but lacks support for 
> external definitions and some PLM constructs, as required by the DR source. 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:04 AM, Clem Cole <cl...@ccc.com> wrote:
below

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 10:31 AM, Armistead, Jason BIS 
<jason.armist...@otis.com> wrote:
Sorry for this off-topic posting, but with all the recent talk about Intel’s 
history of x86 development, I was wondering whether there are any “Intel 
connected” people around here who might know what happened to the source code 
for Intel’s PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities (LINK86, LOC86, LIB86, CREF86 
and OH86).  The manuals for many of these are on Bitsavers.
​I've wondered the same.​


 
 
 
PL/M-86 was never (to my knowledge)
​I thought Seattle Computer ​products used it to write some of DOS-86, which 
they later sold to Gates (which became DOS).  


 

 
We also used PL/M-80 under ISIS-II on Intel’s iPDS and MDS-80 development 
workstations, PL/M-80 under iSIM85 ISIS-II emulator on DOS/Windows 16/32-bit, 
as well as PL/M-51 under DOS/Windows 16/32-bit.  There were also PL/M-286 and 
PL/M-386 varieties, and possibly PL/M-48 (?) though I never personally used 
them.
I believe that all of the Intel tools were in FTN in those days - the 
assembler, tools and PL/x.
I once had some of them I looked a while ago, but I have long lost track of the 
sources.​


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[Simh] Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities source code

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Sorry for this off-topic posting, but with all the recent talk about Intel's 
history of x86 development, I was wondering whether there are any "Intel 
connected" people around here who might know what happened to the source code 
for Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities (LINK86, LOC86, LIB86, CREF86 
and OH86).  The manuals for many of these are on Bitsavers.

I have used both the DOS-hosted and VAX/VMS hosted versions of these tools, but 
when Y2K was approaching I reached out to Intel to see if we could obtain the 
source code under some sort of license (given that these products weren't being 
sold anymore) that would allow us to modify it for Y2K just to tidy up the 
generated compiler listing files, linker map files, etc., which were the only 
real place dates and times were used.  The reply I got from Intel was basically 
stating that this was "lost" and no-one knew what became of it.  And now, with 
the switch to x64, Windows 7.x and later Windows incarnations no longer support 
running the old 16-bit DOS executables in a 64-bit environment, other than 
resorting to virtually hosted DOS using DOSbox, VirtualBox or similar.

PL/M-86 was never (to my knowledge) used to build a widely-used operating 
system in the way its predecessor PL/M-80 was used to build the early CP/M 1.x 
and 2.0, so it never quite got as much attention as  "piece of computing 
history".

We also used PL/M-80 under ISIS-II on Intel's iPDS and MDS-80 development 
workstations, PL/M-80 under iSIM85 ISIS-II emulator on DOS/Windows 16/32-bit, 
as well as PL/M-51 under DOS/Windows 16/32-bit.  There were also PL/M-286 and 
PL/M-386 varieties, and possibly PL/M-48 (?) though I never personally used 
them.

Interestingly, I just discovered that there was a PL/M-VAX version (see 
http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html ) that was written in Fortran and emits VAX 
instructions.  From looking at that source it looks like that was something 
done by National Energy Software Center at the Argonne National Laboratory 
using Intel code from 1981 as a starting point.

I probably should have thought of asking on the SIMH e-mail list years ago !  
Perhaps someone on this list has connections at Intel (or used to work there) 
and maybe this source code really does exist in either the corporate archives 
or in some private or museum collection.

Cheers
Jason A.

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Re: [Simh] Sounds

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 12:23 PM Kevin Handy wrote:

> Nowodays, many people haven't even heard a dot-matrix printer grinding away, 
> let alone the huge mass of fans that seemed to make up most of an 11/70.
> Daisy weel printers are also extremely rare now. Line printers (drum, chain, 
> printronix) seem to be nonexistant any more, but were how most of us thought 
> about computers.

I always thought those band printers were the noisiest contraptions.  Always 
housed in their own sound-proofed box, they let out an awful noise when the lid 
was opened !
 

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Re: [Simh] SIMH and physical hardware

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On 2/9/16 11:41 PM, Zachary Kline wrote:
> This is around 50% humorous, but it’s still a thing I’ve been thinking about 
> lately. From a newbie’s perspective, all SIMH machines are very similar. The 
> worst thing about emulation is that the “feel,” of the original hardware 
> doesn’t seem to be there. Simh can emulate tons of hardware from different 
> manufacturers, but none of that will tell me what it was like to actually use 
> the devices in a physical sense.
> As a blind user, I’m doubly interested in this kind of physicality because I 
> experience the world through touch and sound. I have little conception of the 
> shape or size of many of these notional machines, and they are all reduced to 
> various abstractions at a console prompt. It’s hard to imagine a thing I was 
> far too young to experience.
> I was reminded of an Apple II emulator I saw once, sadly not accessible, 
> which made the appropriate disk drive noises in use. Its kind of useless from 
> a  practical standpoint, but a lot of my interest in these machines isn’t 
> practical to begin with. I want to explore an earlier kind of computing, but 
> don’t expect to get a job with it or have anything beyond some entertainment.
> I really don’t know what, if anything, can be done to bridge this weird 
> disconnect. Actual hardware is probably gradually fading out, and in any case 
> probably wouldn’t be accessible from my perspective anyway.
>
> Any thoughts? Apologies for the disjointed post, it’s rather late. ;) 

Others have mentioned the familiar sound of disk drives and other devices.  In 
the world of SIMH, if the emulated system is running at a higher speed than the 
original hardware, the access times of such devices is also reduced (possibly 
quite significantly).  So what might have once been the slow clack-clack sound 
of floppy drive heads being stepped into position or recalibrated back to track 
zero, now becomes a much faster, higher-pitched sound.  Unless the simulated 
I/O device response timing matches that of the original hardware it emulates, 
attempting to play back recordings from physical hardware based on when and how 
SIMH access that device would be impossible to achieve, or be completely 
unsynchronized, or would need to be sped up, resulting in a "Vintage Computing 
meets the Chipmunks" sound !

PS: I always remember the sounds of an RD54 disk buzzing to life during the 
boot sequence of our trusty MicroVAX 2000, and the TK50 tape leader being 
picked up by the drive mechanism when first loaded.

Just my $0.02 worth
Jason
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Re: [Simh] Pascal 1.3 manual for RSX 11 4.6

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Al Kossow wrote:

> here is the SPD
>
> http://h18000.www1.hp.com/info/SP1418/SP1418PF.PDF

And the second page of the SPD even mentions "On-line Debugging Technique 
(ODT)" - the topic of one of our other recent SIMH mailing list threads !!!


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[Simh] The minutiae of hardware/software interactions affecting SIMH

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On the topic of Configuring DMC11 Devices, while discussing wait delays Mark 
Pizzolato recently wrote:

> Sounds reasonable.  I've got to see if I can find the reason the delay was 
> initially added and make sure a change like this is compatible.

What is the "SIMH strategy" for documenting such requirements ? i.e. where does 
this behavior get called out in the source code (or elsewhere) in a way that 
will allow future generations of SIMH users and maintainers to understand "why 
things are the way they are" or "why things need to be the way they are" ?

There is one reference to the DDCMP protocol manual in the source of 
pdp11_dmc.c, but that's about it.  Should references to other documents be 
added ?

Reconstructing and understanding history is easy when people familiar with the 
subject matter (especially those who lived it, in this case, at DEC) are still 
around to ask, but gets progressively harder as years go by without leaving a 
good trail of "breadcrumbs" for others to follow.

PS: I am constantly amazed at the sheer volume of knowledge and resourcefulness 
that contributors to this list have, which is one of the reasons I'd love to 
see as much of it preserved directly in the SIMH code base !!!


Jason

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Re: [Simh] terminal multiplexers

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Patrick Finnegan  wrote:

>DEC's DECserver, Xyplex Maxserver, Annex terminal servers, and Xylogics (for 
>the ones I have touched and remember) all converted telnet into
> real RS/EIA-232 lines. (telnet client -> host serial, or serial terminal -> 
> host telnet server)

The early DECservers like the DECserver 100 & 200 models only spoke LAT 
protocol to host systems, and required a MOP boot file download to get up and 
running.  The early models had a Motorola 68000 CPU inside them, and just 
enough firmware in EPROM to do some basic startup diagnostics and complete the 
MOP boot.  The later DECserver 90M (introduced circa mid 1990s) was one of the 
first to support Telnet in addition to LAT, and had all their firmware on board.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECserver for a bit of an overview of the 
various models and capabilities.

I originally used DECserver 200s running LAT on our VAX/VMS systems, but I 
believe it was also available on PDPs (running RSX ?) and Ultrix / OSF/1 / 
Digital Unix, and nowadays there is even an open source LAT and MOP daemon 
implementation for Linux.

The DECservers 200s were rock solid performers in our engineering offices and 
on the factory floor.



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Re: [Simh] VMS/VDE: Almost there

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Rich Alderson wrote:

>DECNET is available under RSX-11M and RSTS/E on PDP-11s, Tops-10 and TOPS-20 
>on PDP-10s, and under VMS (and possibly Ultrix, I don't remember for certain)
>on VAXen, and on VMS follow-on systems.  It is as far as possible agnostic 
>about what kind of system it was running on or connecting to.

Don't forget that DECnet was also available on DOS and Windows PCs via the DEC 
Pathworks, and later, Pathworks 32 product lines.

It was also available on Ultrix for RISC (e.g. DECstations with MIPS CPU) and 
OSF/1 aka Digital Unix for Alpha

DEC at one stage produced a DECimage scanning platform that coupled an 80286 PC 
running DOS + DEC Ethernet card, together with a Fujitsu scanner and Xionics 
interface card (to handle the CCITT G42D compression).  The resultant output 
was either TIFF files or DDIF (Digital Document Interchange Format) files.  
Everything was triggered from the VMS system talking DECnet to the PC.



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Re: [Simh] Mark's mailbox full

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

I actually find it interesting how much it reveals about the target e-mail and 
account configuration

We know he's running VMS
We know he has a disk called $DISK3:
We know his user space is under $DISK3:[MARK]
And we know we've successfully filled his disk, thus denying some level of 
service and system functionality

In this era of hackers that feed off this sort of exposed data, I doubt any 
modern mail server would be game to post back so much configuration-specific 
information that could be used to aid in a targeted hacking attack.

Cheers
Jason A

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Alan Frisbie
Sent: Friday, 7 August 2015 7:33 PM
To: SIMH@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] Mark's mailbox full

If anyone know how to get in touch with Mark Pizzolato outside of email, please 
let him know that he has a disk allocation failure:

 This is a report on the delivery status of your message.
 
   Message-ID:  15080716022951_...@slug.flying-disk.com
   Subject: Re: [Simh] Problem with default builds
 
   --Failed delivery to:
   Address: MARK+SIMH
   Status:  error writing !AS
 
 Reporting-MTA: dns;infocomm.com
 Arrival-Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 15:25:38 -0700
 
 Final-Recipient: x-local;MARK+SIMH
 Action: failed
 Status: 5.2.0 (Other or undefined mailbox status)
 Diagnostic-Code: x-local;error writing !AS  %MAIL-W-WRITEERR, error 
 writing $DISK3:[MARK.MAIL]MAIL.MAI  -RMS-F-FUL, device full 
 (insufficient space for allocation)
 Last-Attempt-Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 15:25:40 -0700

Thanks,
Alan Frisbie
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Re: [Simh] vector images

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Surely it is possible to extract files from SETUP.MSI without running the 
installer.  Someone must have the tools to do this (either commercial or 
freeware perhaps ?).

Another alternative is to run a virtual Windows OS image inside something like 
VirtualBox, thus avoiding any problems “destroying” your day-to-day Windows 
host system (if you even have one).  I you didn’t specify what Windows version 
the rimh altairz80 emulator requires, so this may or may not be possible.  
Other alternatives to VirtualBox might be something like the Bochs IA-32 
emulator.

From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Kevin Handy
Sent: Thursday, 16 July 2015 8:50 PM
To: Dennis Boone
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] vector images

Yes, they are there, in a file called setup.msi, and nowhere else.
So, as long as you ahve a windows machine that you don;t care if it installs 
older file on top of newer ones,  I had to re-install too many windows systems 
because of this, and finding all of the right install pckges, and figuring out 
the proprt order to reinstall them to get a working system was always a pain. 
msi is the old install format that comonly had this problem.
However, I think I have come up with a painful, roundabout way to extract the 
files, maybe. If not, I was just curious about its memory mapped video, ans if 
the flexwriter emulation was useful enough to bother with. If this doesn't 
work, I'll just have to give up on it.

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 8:44 PM, Dennis Boone 
d...@msu.edumailto:d...@msu.edu wrote:
  Many companies builf computers that  used this operating system, like
  the altair, imsai, osborne, kaypro, and vector graPhics to name a
  few.  Many years later, the rimh altairz80 emulator was written with
  the abiliry ro emulate the vector graphic machines, but the only copy
  of the necessary config and disk images was wrapped up in a miceosoft
  install file called setup.msi.

1. Vector Graphic, no s.

2. Most of the stuff in the altairz80 kits is probably available from
vector-archive.orghttp://vector-archive.org.

De

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Re: [Simh] DEC floppy disk interleave questions

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Dying RFxx disks might be due to failure of FLASH memory in the controllers 
(either onboard the CPU or external chips).  The charge in the memory cells in 
FLASH memory chips doesn't last forever, and slowly bleeds away.  Early devices 
could fail after 10 years.  Newer FLASH parts are better, but the lifetime is 
not infinite like it was with PROMs/EPROMs.

The folks at CMU and LSI Corp wrote a good article about this:

http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-memory-data-retention_hpca15.pdf

And to Alan's floppy archiving plans - Just remember to regularly refresh 
your CD collection.  Those CD-R disks don't last forever either!  If it was me, 
I'd be creating at least two copies.

Cheers
Jason

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Hans-Ulrich 
Hölscher
Sent: Thursday, 16 July 2015 9:16 AM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] DEC floppy disk interleave questions


   if you want to image your disks and floppies for use with simh,   
 there's an easy way to do it.  All you need is a (Micro-)VAX   having 
 the appropriate drive(s) running VMS.
   MOUNT/FOREIGN
   COPY/LOG  yourimagename.img
   DISMOUNT
   Don't worry about the error message at the end of the COPY process  
  - that's normal, just that copy discovers the end of media.
   You get an image containing all the blocks of your device in   
 logical order - VMS will take care of the device details.

 That sounds like the really easy way to do it.   Does it copy
 track 0 of RX01/02 floppies?

Every bit that is readable normally from VMS, hiding only strange sector orders 
and bad block information.
Images from bootable devices are bootable within simh (as long as there's a 
suitable bootable simh device)


 I finally got a MicroVAX 3300 up and running again.   Most of
 my RF3x drives seem to have died while in storage.  Now I have to see 
 if any of the RX02 drives will still work.

So are my RF3xs :-((
My DSSI-VAXen run on HSD coupled RZ disks in BA350 boxes now.


   Will you make your images available?

 Absolutely!   I'm still working on the 9-track tapes, after a
 several-week pause due to my Alpha XP1000 dying and me taking time out 
 for a couple of all-weekend endurance races (24 Hours of LeMons -- the 
 fruit, not the town in France).

 I plan to put all my DEC media images on CDs so I can easily
 make copies.   Each tape/floppy image will be accompanied by a
 text file with the label and other information, and a .JPG photo
 of the media and label.   I've done about 300 tapes so far, of
 which 82 are DEC.   I have another 300 or so to do.   I should
 be done in a couple of months.


I'm very keen on your software pool, many thanks for preserving it!

As you probably know I'm mainly after old VMS software (everything pre VMS V5)
 

Regards

Ulli




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Re: [Simh] Booting the vax750 simulator.

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Out of curiosity, I did a bit of Googling, and found a link to the following 
Digital Technical Journal article from 1992 that explains GEM in detail.  It 
also gives the biographies of a number of the key players involved with GEM – I 
wonder how many Clem still has sitting in his office these days.

http://www.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/macro/DEC/DTJ/DTJ808/DTJ808PF.PDF

Jason

From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Clem Cole
Sent: Tuesday, 7 July 2015 4:17 PM
To: Henry Bent
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com; Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm
Subject: Re: [Simh] Booting the vax750 simulator.


On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Henry Bent 
hb...@oberlin.edumailto:hb...@oberlin.edu wrote:
It appears that it comes with VAX C, which is part of the base Ultrix packages.

​That makes sense.   As I said, I'm would suspect it was driven by VAX Fortran 
project, but once that was done any of the DEC languages would have used it 
since GEM tried to be common for all.

GEM was an amazing project.   N front ends, Y backends.  A compiler suite 
designed to last for 20 years.   Needed to span a 16 to 64 bits, parallel, 
vectorization etc.N included Fortran, Bliss, C, C++, Pascal, ​Cobol, Ada, 
Basic and I believe others now forgotten.   Y was PDP-11, Vax, MIPS, Alpha, 
Itanium, x86, 68K, Prism and again probably others which I have forgotten.

Clem

BTW:  Intel owns all of the IP and the few members of the GEM team that have 
not yet retired (we will lose Mr. Fortran on July 15).   IMO:  Sadly, guess 
which compiler technology Intel uses, something developed locally to benchmark 
the x86 or GEM?   As Rich Grove (father of GEM) once said to me, the DEC DNA 
lives, and has slowly been injected into the Intel technology.

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Re: [Simh] Problem with reading tape with PDP-11 SIMH

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

So now that Alan has TPC working, where and how do we document all this, i.e. 
the symptoms, the underlying SIMH design  behavior vs the expected RSX 
behavior that cause it to manifest itself as a problem, and the DEP TS TIME 
solution, in an easy-to-find way so the next person doesn't have to go through 
this pain ?

There is an awful lot of collective wisdom from the contributors to this e-mail 
list, but unless someone diligently searches the mailing list archives and gets 
lucky, it's not easy for a user to solve their own problem, even if it's been 
seen several times previously.

The SIMH FAQ on the trailing edge web site (in PDF) has not been updated in 3 
years, and the DOC version on GitHub was last updated a little over 2 years 
ago, and I wonder whether a better living form of documentation like a Wiki 
would be a more useful solution. i.e. when a system-specific usage-related 
problem is discovered (and hopefully fixed), the cause, effect and solution is 
distilled into an appropriate new or existing Wiki page.

As I read the e-mails on this list, I am in constant awe at the depth of 
knowledge that many contributors have - in this particular case Mark and 
Timothe did the heavy lifting to help Alan, but there are many others whose 
first-hand experience back in the day drives SIMH user problems to a 
solution.  How do we preserve everyone's legacy of product knowledge for future 
generations who will use SIMH long after they are gone ?  To me it's as 
important as preserving the knowledge of the hardware SIMH simulates.

Jason

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Alan Frisbie
Sent: Thursday, 21 May 2015 8:16 PM
To: m...@infocomm.com
Cc: SIMH@trailing-edge.com
Subject:  Re: [Simh] Problem with reading tape with PDP-11 SIMH

Mark,

 Please follow Timothe Litt's suggestion and get back to me with the 
 minimal value of DEP TS TIME which produces reasonable results for the 
 original TPC problem you saw.

Here are the results:

5000 - TPC works fine
2500 - TPC works fine
1800 - TPC works fine
1500 - TPC works fine, RSX reported tape drive errors
1350 - TPC works fine, RSX reported tape drive errors
1200 - TPC hangs
0- TPC hangs

To be safe, I think I'll use 2000 from now on when using TPC.

Thanks a lot for all the help.   It saved me a lot of
debugging and head scratching.

Alan Frisbie
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[Simh] In the DEC world, what was ZK3 ?

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

One of the recent discussions on this list mentioned ZK3

I remember it also appeared in numerous DEC publications, with e-mail addresses 
@zk3.digital.com, and, I think, in some DEC documentation (though I may be 
wrong on that point)

What exactly was ZK3 ?  I'm gathering it was possibly a building on the DEC 
campus in Nashua NH.

What did the initials ZK stand for ?  And what was done there ?

Just curious !


Jason

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