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 _______________________________________________ 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
