Re: [Simh] Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

Back in the late 1980's, my firm had a program called WATCH (binary is 
WATCHMAN.EXE) that allowed both passive and interactive monitoring of a 
terminal. In passive mode, you could see the activity on the specified 
line without any interaction (WATCH/NOINPUT). In interactive mode, you 
could interact with the session. It was a very useful tool for helping 
remote users. Much like Windows software now that lets you (and 
scammers) provide remote assistance to someone's computer.


I searched the binary for any strings indicating authorship and I cannot 
find anything. The firm had other "interesting" VMS tools besides this 
one including what I considered to be the best deleted file recovery 
utility (RECOVER.EXE) but I never found out where they all came from. 
One of our employees was the late John Wisnewski, who had started the 
VMS Hobbyist Program, so it is possible they were something he obtained. 
When I visited him at our office in Dallas back in the 80's, he gave me 
a tape with all kinds of interesting "toys". Sadly I do not have that 
tape any longer.


On 3/25/2020 10:40 AM, simh-requ...@trailing-edge.com wrote:

Re:  Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program


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Re: [Simh] VAX PSI

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

At my firm, we used VAX 2780-3780 to perform dialup 2780 BISYNC 
emulation to a remote data provider (1989-1992 time-frame - 
pre-internet). I wrote a program that would send the dialing 
instructions to the modem over the X.25 port and then wait for the 
carrier signal to be detected. It would then switch to BISYNC and the 
data would start downloading. One thing that was very annoying about the 
2780-3780 software was a bug I hit in either the VAXBI X.25 port driver 
(name of the BI card escapes me) or the VAX 2780-3780 software. We were 
running on a VAX 6330 and anytime I shut the system down, as soon as the 
VAX 2780-3780 daemon process was terminated, the system would BUGCHECK 
on a SPINLOCK issue. I solved the issue by doing some kernel magic and 
marking the process NODELETE early in the shutdown phase. As such, the 
process stayed alive until VMS itself terminated and the BUGCHECK's went 
away.


We started migrating to HP/UX in May 1992 and it was never a priority to 
have DEC fix it. The workaround worked and that was fine with me.


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Re: [Simh] HPE has started emailing the final hobbyist licenses

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

V5.5-2 is the environment I have. When I joined the hobbyist program in 
2004, I bought the VMS V7.2 CD but I also had an old 4mm DAT tape with a 
final image backup of a MicroVAX 3900 running V5.5-2 prior to its being 
decommissioned at the end of 1996 and the hardware scrapped. I was 
eventually able to extract the image from the 4mm with a combination of 
4mm drive on Windows NT and the VMS V7.2 system to build disks. When I 
booted the V5.5-2 image under the MicroVAX SiMH simulator, it came right 
up without any problems as it believed, and the installed PAK's 
believed, it was running on a real MicroVAX 3900.


These days I boot it perhaps once every 3 or 4 months just to reminisce. 
I get a kick out of looking at some of the kernel mode Macro-32 I had 
written way back in the early 1990's. One of executables gives me a 
control-T type status display when I press control-P and the other 
causes the time to be continuously displayed in the lower right side of 
the status bar of a VT4xx terminal, updating every second (it actually 
works with Tera Term 4.x in VT420 mode). They run Kernel or Exec mode 
because they load themselves into P1 space and run basically as the DOS 
equivalent of TSR's. Looking at that old code I find it hard to believe 
I wrote it. There is also a lot of VAX BASIC stuff I wrote with SMG$. 
Hard to believe so much of this is 28 to 30 years old.


As for 7.2, I have not booted the V7.2 image since the hobbyist PAK's 
expired years ago and I never kept them up.


On 3/13/2020 9:40 AM, simh-requ...@trailing-edge.com wrote:

  Re:  HPE has started emailing the final hobbyist licenses


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Re: [Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 179, Issue 35

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

On 12/31/2018 12:00 PM, simh-requ...@trailing-edge.com wrote:

Control/T support was an optional feature, enabled during SYSGEN, for
some time.  I'm fairly sure it was never an undocumented feature, but it
  wasn't standard originally.



 paul

I decided to dig into the V6C system a bit further. I am amazed at what 
I have remembered these 30+ years. I patched SYSTAT.BAS to display the 
Pri/RB column that we had available on our V06C-03 system. Even 
remembered how to change a protection to <232> using:


PIP SYSTAT.BAC<232> /RE

(not even sure how I recalled that after all these years LOL)

RSTS V06C-03 Timesharing status at 31-Dec-98, 13:16    Up: 24

Job    Who    Where    What    Size    State    Run-Time  Pri/RB RTS
 1 1,2    Det ERRCPY   5/28K   SR    4.7    0/6 BASIC
 2 1,4    KB0 SYSTAT   8/28K   RN Lck    0.0   -8/6 BASIC

Then I took a look at V06C TTDVR.MAC and that is where it got 
interesting. There are references to CONTROL/T support but it is not 
calling the mini SYSTAT routine:


TI$CRR::    ;;HANDLE CONTROL/R (RETYPE)
TI$CTT::    ;;HANDLE CONTROL/T (SYSTAT)

.IF NE  EKOCTL

    BITB    #TTECTL,TTMODE(R1) ;;ECHO CONTROL MODE?
    BNE TTNORM  ;;YES, MAKE A NORMAL CHARACTER

.ENDC   ;EKOCTL

    CALL    TTISGL  ;;CHECK FOR SPECIAL MODE(S)
    BNE TTNORM  ;;MAKE NORMAL CHARACTER IF ANY
    BIT #TTFUNC,TTCHAR(R1) ;;ALLOWING SPECIAL FUNCTION CHARACTER
S?
    BNE TTNORM  ;;NOPE, MAKE A NORMAL CHARACTER
    CMP R2,#'R-100  ;;IS IT CONTROL/R?
    BNE 40$ ;;NOPE, IT IS CONTROL/T
    CALL    ASCOUE,R5,TTICRC ;;ANNOUNCE WITH "^R"
    MOV R5,-(SP)    ;;SAVE R5
    MOV TTINPT+EP(R1),R5 ;;GET THE CURRENT EMPTY POINTER
    BIT #TT2741!TAPE!NOECHO,DDFLAG(R1) ;;SHOULD WE DO THIS?
    BEQ 30$ ;;YES
10$:    MOV (SP)+,R5    ;;RESTORE R5
    RETURN  ;;EXIT

20$:    MOV -40(R5),R5  ;;GET NEXT BUFFER IN CHAIN
30$:    CMP R5,TTINPT+FP(R1) ;;MORE CHARACTERS?
    BEQ 10$ ;;NO, DONE
    BIT R5,#40-1    ;;YES, MORE ROOM IN THIS BUFFER?
    BEQ 20$ ;;OUT OF ROOM, GO TO NEXT BUFFER
    MOVB    (R5)+,R2    ;;ROOM, GET THE CHARACTER
    BIC #^C<177>,R2 ;;TRIM OFF ANY JUNK
    CALL    CHOUTO  ;; AND OUTPUT IT
    BR  30$ ;;  THEN LOOP

40$:    JMP TTSYST  ;;GO DO THE MINI SYSTAT

    TMPORG  TTSYST

TTSYST: JMP TTNORM  ;;MAKE IT A NORMAL CHARACTER

The TTSYST label simply reverts control-T to a normal character without 
calling the mini SYSTAT routine (wherever it is located). Checking the 
V7.0 TTDVR.MAC code I see there is support to call the routine:


40$:    CALL    MAPPED,R5,TTSYST ;;GO TRY FOR A MINI SYSTEM (USING PAR6 
CODE)

    BCS TTNORM  ;;NOT LEGAL NOW, MAKE A NORMAL CHARACTER
    RETURN  ;;DONE, JUST RETURN

    TMPORG  TTSYST
TTSYST: SEC ;;SAY MINI SYSTAT NOT LEGAL (UNLESS 
OVERLAID)

    RETURN  ;; AND EXIT
    UNORG

I did my own V06C SYSGEN and there is no option to build it in like 
there is in a V7.0 SYSGEN. I can only imagine the site we were using, 
Nassau County New York's BOCES system that was shared by schools all 
over the county, had some additional, possibly experimental, patches 
that were not part of the base V06C-03. As I noted earlier, our 
control-T functionality was controlled by the SET CTRL/R command and if 
control-R was turned off in TTYSET, so was control-T. Also we 
non-privileged users could see our job priority which was a feature that 
was removed for non-privileged users in V7.0.


Oh well, it has been an interesting few hours reminiscing with that old 
V06C system. The stuff I still recall is amusing. My last on-the-job 
work with RSTS/E was at a shop that had a V8.0 system on an 11/34 and a 
V9.0 system on an 11/73 back in the fall of 1985. We developers 
preferred working on the V9.0 system as it was faster and more "VMS" 
like. V8.0 was a very odd duck IMHO.


Robert

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Re: [Simh] Quest from 1979 on RSTS/E V06C-03 in Simh (Brett Bump)

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

> Or you could grab the pre-genned V6C kit from:
>
> 
http://www.rsts.org/autoindex.php?dir=distros/RSTS_kits/=RSTS_V6C_Kit.zip


I tried booting that, and it does boot, but the startup does not run. No 
system initialization is performed and I login as job 1 with no CCL's 
defined. The version at https://skn.noip.me/pdp11/rk2.dsk does boot and 
has all commands installed.


Looking at both environments there are two things I noticed as different 
from the V06C-03 I was using in high school back in 1978. On our system 
we had control-T available that was enabled and disabled along with 
control-R. What was interesting was that it would show the job priority 
for non-privileged users. Priority display was removed in 7.0 for 
non-privileged users. We hackers discovered that on a slow running 
system, one could repeatedly hit control-C during login and abort the 
change from logged out priority +0 to priority -8 by LOGIN (control-T 
let us see that we were still at +0). That gave our teacher and the 
county data center where we rented access to the PDP-11/70 system fits.  
Eventually they wrote a "guard" program that would drop the priority of 
any non-privileged job found to be greater -8. The problem with that 
check was that some jobs legitimately got bumped to -4 priority 
temporarily due to the set-special-run-priority syscall. The "guard" did 
not recognize that and pushed jobs back down to -8.


The other difference I noticed is that SYSTAT in privileged mode does 
not show the runburst. In privileged mode, SYSTAT had a "Pri/RB" column 
whereas this V06C-03 only has "Priority". That was documented in the 
RSTS/E manual I had bought from DEC.


I have to wonder if we were running a version of V06C-03 with those 
additional enhancements. It definitely was not 7.0. I graduated in June 
1980 and I was told they upgraded to 7.0 that summer.

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[Simh] Problem using a real VT terminal with simh

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

Several years ago I wanted to hookup and old VT320 that I have and I did
manage to get it to work but I did not go with the direct serial I/O
connection in SiMH.  Instead I found a program called TCPToSer that
established a TCP/IP connection from the serial port.  It worked fine with
a USB to serial adapter that I had and I pointed the application at my SiMH
TCP/IP port.  This was way back in the mid-2000's.  The application was
available from www.tcptoser.de but that URL is now dead.  A search did turn
up a download from a site starting with "brother" but it is infected with
Win32/Spursint.F!cl.  If a clean copy of that software can be found, it
does work beautifully with SiMH.  I was able to navigate around EDT very
nicely using the GOLD key and various sequences my fingers still remembered
LOL.


On Tue, Dec 5, 2017 at 1:40 PM,  wrote:

> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Peter Allan 
> To: "simh@trailing-edge.com" 
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2017 17:56:29 +
> Subject: [Simh] Problem using a real VT terminal with simh
> I am trying to get a real VT420 terminal working with a simulated micro
> VAX 3900. However, I am having problems getting text displayed on the
> screen of the VT420.
>
> The host for simh is a standard PC running CentOS 6.9.
>
> I am connecting the VT420 to the PC using the 25-pin RS232 connector at
> the back of the VT420, going via a 25-pin to 9-pin adaptor, to the 9-pin
> RS232 connector on the PC. I am convinced that the physical connection is
> correct since I can start an agetty process at boot time and log into
> CentOS from the VT420. Everything works and displays as I would expect.
>
> For what follows, I have removed the starting of the agetty process so
> that nothing is controlling the /dev/ttyS0 device before I start simh.
>
> The simulated microVAX 3900 is running VMS 7.3 from an RA92 disk. This
> configuration has been running successfully for a long time and I am only
> now trying to add the connection of a physical terminal.
>
> In the vax.ini file, I have added the lines
>
> SET DZ LINES=4
> ATTACH DZ LINE=0,CONNECT=SER0
>
> Once the microVAX has booted, if I hit Enter on the VT420, then I can see
> that a login process starts on the simulated microVAX, but all I see on the
> screen of the VT420 is a few garbage characters. Despite that, when I type
> a username and a password, I do get logged into the simulated microVAX. Any
> commands that I type on the keyboard of the VT420 appears on the screen of
> the VT420 (except the password, of course), but anything that the microVAX
> is sending to the VT420 appears as garbage. There are recognisable
> characters, but if I TYPE a file, even a small one, what appears seems to
> be every 7th character from the file starting with the first character. The
> output of commands such as DIR appear to have the same problem.
>
> Furthermore, when I log into the microVAX, the VT420 goes through a reset,
> as though I had turned it off and on. I think this is because the login
> sequence does a SET TERMINAL/INQUIRE since if I type that command, exactly
> the same thing happens. This seems particularly odd since I have used that
> command many times with a real computer (although admittedly not with this
> particular terminal) and I have never seen this happen before.
>
> The VT420's RS232 port is set to a speed of 9600, with 8 bits and no
> parity and the TTA0: device on the microVAX also gets set to this
> combination.
>
> Hopefully I am just doing something wrong, but I can't see what that might
> be. Can anyone help with this please?
>
> Peter Allan
>
>
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Re: [Simh] Mark's mailbox full

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

Ah those munged up error messages bring back memories: !AS

On 8/7/2015 7:33 PM, Alan Frisbie wrote:

Status:  error writing !AS


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Re: [Simh] 'Showstopper'

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

Soul of a New Machine (still have a copy) came out back when I was 
still in college and we were a Data General shop with two MV/8000's.  So 
it was a doubly interesting read.  Not only for the story itself but the 
fact that it also applied to the actual hardware and OS we were learning 
computer science on (it also explained very nicely what those eight 
memory rings were that we kept hearing about) .  I do wish there was a 
viable SIMH Eclipse emulator with AOS/VS available.  30+ years later I 
still have gobs of computer printouts of various interesting AOS/VS 
programs.  Many in assembler.  My first real job in the mid-80's was 
working for a reseller that dealt in both DEC and Data General 
hardware.  That was the last time I was able to really hack with an 
AOS/VS system running on an MV/4000.


Robert

On 3/7/2015 9:30 AM, dave porter wrote:

Sounds a bit hyped...


Well, no more so than 'The Soul Of A New Machine'.  This
was in the days when the general public were still prepared
to be amazed at, and interested in, stories of programmers
that stayed up all night, etc.

Programmers probably have a cooler image than they did when
I were a lad, but some of the 'outsider mystique' has surely
been lost now that everyone does it  :-)

dave

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Re: [Simh] Seems Like there might a consulting Job here for someone on this list

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

Wow!  If they are truly running on an 11/780 then switching to a virtual
environment would be a no-brainer.  Not only would performance and
electrical usage improve but it would be easier to maintain hardware wise.
Licensing of the software would be the big issue.  Plus the fact that it
processes $130 million in payroll would give me a bit of pause to make sure
it was running on secure hardware.  Still an interesting article!

On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 9:38 AM, Clem Cole cl...@ccc.com wrote:

 Hawaii seems to still be running a 780 with Cobol application to process
 its state payroll:



 http://www.civilbeat.com/2014/11/civil-bytes-our-new-governor-should-upgrade-states-sorry-technology/

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Re: [Simh] Data General - MV

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

AOS/VS!  That brings back memories.  I used it in college back in the 
1980's on an MV/8000.  Later at a reseller I worked for I had an MV/4000 
in-house and various other MV's that were in various stages of being 
sent to customers.  My last contact with AOS/VS would have been with 
release 6.0.0.0 or 7.0.0.0 in late 1987.  Sadly I have forgotten a lot 
about it though I still have reams of code I wrote back in the day as 
well as some internals tools written in macro.  I did have some fun 
patching the kernel to add Load System Ring privilege to PID 2 as well 
as add an IO privilege to my profile that PREDITOR did not offer but 
EXEC was more than happy to pass on to its children.


One thing that was quite advanced for its days was support of Tasks 
which we now call Threads.  The ability to have a program run several 
sections of code simultaneously was an incredible concept though 
necessary in order to implement Control-C/Control-A handlers.  
Cross-task synchronization and deadlocking were all issues I learned 
about before they again became issues for the multi-threading community.


If there ever was such an emulator I would not mind trying it out.  
Currently I play with the PDP11 and VAX emulators as I would up spending 
much more time working with DEC equipment than DG.  As such, I have 
retained a lot more knowledge about RSTS/E and VMS than I have about AOS/VS


Robert


On 5/11/2012 4:27 AM, Steve Merrony wrote:
I have heard it said that most successful OS efforts begin with with 
someone who 'has an itch to scratch'.  My persistent itch is a curious 
desire to have AOS/VS running in some form.


Over the years there has been a small amount of discussion on this 
forum about 32-bit DG, but it always peters out with someone saying 
they are in touch with ex-DG IP holders and then nothing continues to 
happen...  Given the historical interest in the creation of the Eagle 
this seems to me to be a crying shame.


I have been pondering a way forward; as I see it there are two options:

1. We go ahead with an MV simulator in SimH.  There is a lot of intact 
hardware documentation freely available on the net so I would have 
thought this is technically feasible.  The problem is software, but 
there are a few MVs around the world now run by enthusiasts  - maybe 
they could be persuaded to share privately until an official solution 
is worked out?


2. A non-SimH route: we re-implement AOS/VS on modern hardware!  The 
whole OS, not just the CLI.  This is clearly a wildly different 
option, and at least as much work as option 1, but I think it could be 
a fascinating project in its own right.


Anyone interested?


--
/Stephen Merrony
/


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Re: [Simh] DG Update?

[Robert G. Schaffrath]

It's funny, I was just wondering about AOS/VS myself.  Besides VMS, that 
was the other 32-bit supermini architecture that I was fluent in.  My 
college had an MV8000 back in the 1980;s and I still have old printouts 
of some of the tweaking I used to do.  It would be fun to fire up AOS/VS 
again just for the memories.


On 3/22/2010 9:40 AM, Steve Merrony wrote:
At the end of last year there was mention of a deal being done with 
EMC to release some DG software.


Has any progress been made?  Is any help required?

I'd love to see AOS/VS running under simh, but I know that'll need an 
eclipse emulator...


--
/Stephen Merrony
http://www.stephenmerrony.co.uk/


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