Article 2192 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!nwnews.wa.com!Ikkoku-Kan.Panda.COM!mrc From: Mark Crispin Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Tymnet 10's Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1996 15:16:49 -0800 Organization: Pandamonium Reigns Lines: 12 Message-ID: References: <32655B5B.61CF@zso.dec.com> <54o7n1$ht6@calypso.ulcc.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: panda.wa.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII To: Ronan Flood In-Reply-To: <54o7n1$ht6@calypso.ulcc.ac.uk> On 24 Oct 1996, Ronan Flood wrote: > I seem to remember reading somewhere that -20s were actually > "Chinese Red" (?) The actual name of that color is Terracotta, and I regret my part in the past of spreading the "Chinese Red" myth. -- Mark -- DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot FAX: (206) 842-0758 ICBM: N 47.36'24" W 122.34'08" TOPS-20: A Great Improvement Over Its Successors Article 2200 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news1.digital.com!pa.dec.com!usenet From: "Carl J. Appellof" Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Bill's PDP-10 Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 16:17:36 -0800 Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 28 Message-ID: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: chmist.zso.dec.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (WinNT; I) CC: tressel@zso.dec.com I just got back from DECUS in Anaheim with a little PDP-10 story to relate. The keynote speakers the first day were Bob Palmer and Bill Gates. Bill told a little story about his history with Digital. His first experience was in 8th grade, getting time on a local PDP-10 in Seattle. (They got free time in exchange for finding bugs in TOPS-10. Needless to say, they had all the free time they needed.) Soon after that, he and Paul Allen wrote their first BASIC interpreter using macros in MACRO-10 to interpret BASIC statements. After all the other shameless commercial hype was over, Bob Palmer and Digital presented Bill with his own personal PDP-10 to put in his new house: a MicroVax-II sized box with the DECsystem-10 logo, and a KL front switch panel (which we all know is really a PDP-11 switch panel, but at least the right color). Inside the box was an Alpha running the PDP-10 simulator running TOPS-10. Bill tried hard and finally remembered his project-programmer number (even remembered the term!). Unfortunately at this point, the emulator wasn't working right, and system "MRBILL" never let him log in. Anyway, it was pretty cool, and DECUS made a good audience for this kind of thing. Last slide was a bar chart comparing system performance of the KA10, KI10, KL10, and "Alpha10". The last one was about 100 times the performance of the KL (claimed, not audited). -- Carl Appellof not speaking for Digital Equipment Corporation Article 2202 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!netcom.net.uk!ix.netcom.com!news From: JCGreen@ix.netcom.com (John C Green Jr) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Bill's PDP-10 Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 05:59:11 GMT Organization: Netcom Lines: 39 Message-ID: <56h1dd$s5v@dfw-ixnews3.ix.netcom.com> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: bos-ma6-24.ix.netcom.com X-NETCOM-Date: Fri Nov 15 12:08:45 AM CST 1996 X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 "Carl J. Appellof" wrote: >I just got back from DECUS in Anaheim with a little PDP-10 story to >relate. The keynote speakers the first day were Bob Palmer and Bill >Gates. Bill told a little story about his history with Digital. His >first experience was in 8th grade, getting time on a local PDP-10 in >Seattle. (They got free time in exchange for finding bugs in TOPS-10. >Needless to say, they had all the free time they needed.) Soon after >that, he and Paul Allen wrote their first BASIC interpreter using macros >in MACRO-10 to interpret BASIC statements. The company was Computer Center Corp. They were undercapitalized and didn't have the money to pay for the machine. They used the large number of open bug reports (SPRs) as an excuse not to pay for the machine. The deal was free time in exchange for crashing the system on the condition that each crash was to be documented and not tried again until CCC told the high school crackers that DEC had fixed that particular bug. Digital also offered 'the Giant Bryant,' up to 104 MByte on disks about 3' in diameter (which is often mentioned in this Newsgroup). The project to ship RA10 controllers with RB10 disks was started 6 months before my RP10 controller with RP10 disks; also the RA10 designer was 10 years out of school when I was fresh out. CCC was the only Digital customer for RB10s, having ordered two, taken delivery on one, before they went belly up. Steve (Slug) Russell who was at CCC at the time later told me the only reason they bought the RB10s rather than RP02s is because they thought that with the project engineer having 10 years experience and a six month head start they would be the only PDP-10 timesharing utility with mass storage for some number of months. CCC was correct. The total number of RA10s and RB10s shipped were one each; the total number of RP10s and RP02s shipped were 300 and 1,500 respectively. = = = RP10 Project Engineer - Badge 5523 - 5-5 Pole 41A Currently 21483 Old Mine Rd, Los Gatos CA 95030 See you at Kotok's retirement party, 20NOV96 Article 2209 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!EU.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!usenet.cisco.com!usenet From: billw@puli.cisco.com (William ) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 15 Nov 1996 22:15:49 -0800 Organization: cisco Systems, Incorporated Lines: 21 Message-ID: <54enhur2ei.fsf@puli.cisco.com> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <54n2wj3i6n.fsf@puli.cisco.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: puli.cisco.com In-reply-to: werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com's message of 15 Nov 96 21:36:12 GMT X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.1 >100 times the system performance, eh? Supports over 5000 simultaneous >users, I suppose? I could believe it. Of course, they'd have to be running teco on 110 baud Teletypes and using programs like pip, dir, etc that only needed a Kword or so. I was assuming they were comparing the native speed of the Alpha, rather than the speed after emulation, and I was also assuming a Stanford mid-80s style of user - 9600bps terminals (on terminal servers) running EMACS and MM and pascal compiles and such. Stanford ran their machines into the ground with up to 100 or so users on each machine, but I figured "50 users" was a fair estimate of "pleasant" loading... I guess it might be a little difficult putting 10 100Mbps ethernets in the alpha, not to mention finding 100Mbps "terminal servers"... (I suspect one thing there IS 100 time more of is memory. A 4Mword KL10 had about 20Mbytes, and 2Gbytes of memory isn't all that unusual these days...) BillW Article 2212 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!howland.erols.net!portc02.blue.aol.com!portc01.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 17 Nov 1996 14:38:41 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 35 Sender: news@aol.com Message-ID: <19961117144100.JAA05522@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com (Eric Werme) wrote: <> Last slide was a bar chart comparing system performance of the KA10, <> KI10, KL10, and "Alpha10". The last one was about 100 times the <> performance of the KL (claimed, not audited). <> <>100 times the system performance, eh? Supports over 5000 simultaneous <>users, I suppose? <> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: arbee1.amt.tay1.dec.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Carl J. Appellof (cja@zso.dec.com) wrote: : After all the other shameless commercial hype was over, Bob Palmer and : Digital presented Bill with his own personal PDP-10 to put in his new : house: a MicroVax-II sized box with the DECsystem-10 logo, and a KL : front switch panel (which we all know is really a PDP-11 switch panel, : but at least the right color). Inside the box was an Alpha running the : PDP-10 simulator running TOPS-10. Bill tried hard and finally : remembered his project-programmer number (even remembered the term!). : Unfortunately at this point, the emulator wasn't working right, and : system "MRBILL" never let him log in. : Anyway, it was pretty cool, and DECUS made a good audience for this kind : of thing. : Last slide was a bar chart comparing system performance of the KA10, : KI10, KL10, and "Alpha10". The last one was about 100 times the : performance of the KL (claimed, not audited). : -- : Carl Appellof : not speaking for : Digital Equipment Corporation -- I was the "lucky" person on stage with Gates and Palmer and I still don't know what went wrong with the LAT connect. After all the time I and others had spend getting this event put together, it was quite disappointing that it didn't work. Although, from reading the account here and hearing others, it came off pretty well. The "system" was an LN03 printer cab painted the real blaize(?) blue and the DECSYSTEM-10 logo was made from real photos. The 11-panel was from a real KL (in MR02 lobby) and small circuit board was added to drive the lights. Inside was a 266Mhz Alpha running Digital Unix and Ken Harrenstien's emulator. Eric Williams got the "box" made and I set up the emulator and TOPS-10 system. What was supposed to happen (and what had worked perfectly all along and even earlier that morning) was Gates was supposed to connect to the TOPS-10 system from the laptop running PATHWORKS LAT under Win95. Like I said before, I don't know what went wrong, and probably never will know. larry The Alpha-10 slide wasn't quite right... 8^) It's my educated guess that the "system" was about 1.X times a KL, where X is between 2 and 5. I'm supposed to be getting a 500Mhz Alpha soon, and I'm anxious to take the emulator out for a spin on it. ______________________________________________________________________ Larry Sendlosky Alpha Migration Tools larry@amt.tay1.dec.com Digital Semiconductor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Article 2221 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!portc02.blue.aol.com!portc01.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 19 Nov 1996 13:22:17 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 23 Sender: news@aol.com Message-ID: <19961119132400.IAA22691@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: <56q40j$qla$1@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com larry@arbee1.amt.tay1.dec.com (Larry Sendlosky) wrote: < Eric Williams got [Hey! Larry!] It's nice to hear that TOPS10 still lives and even maintains its cantankerousness even when being emulated. Whenever Jim and Tony worked on something they were real proud of, they would come and get me to admire their latest and greatest. Inevitably, the system would crash, the hardware would go boiinnggg or something would happen. Then they would chase me away, work on the problems, fix them, and come get me again--usually about 6 hours later. They really enjoyed those debugging sessions. /BAH \ Article 2226 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news1.digital.com!pa.dec.com!lead.zk3.dec.com!zk2nws.zko.dec.com!denton.zko.dec.com!amartin From: amartin@denton.zko.dec.com (Alan H. Martin) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: DEC Alumni Date: 19 Nov 1996 16:10:02 GMT Organization: DEC Lines: 13 Message-ID: <56sm4q$t4v@zk2nws.zko.dec.com> References: <56ra89$cns@synthemesc.insync.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: denton.zko.dec.com In article <56ra89$cns@synthemesc.insync.net> spring1@insync.net (spring1) writes: >How do ex-DEC folks keep in touch? Is there a DEC alumni newsgroup or mailing >list somewhere? It would be nice to keep up with events like the above... Check out http://www.decalumni.com/ . (It's a $20/yr organization which publishes a directory and newsletter). They mention a newsgroup ultranet.partners.decalumni , also. Not a member - I merely have a honking big bookmark file, /AHM -- Alan Howard Martin AMartin@TLE.ENet.DEC.Com Article 2223 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-feed2.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news1.digital.com!pa.dec.com!src.dec.com!sweetie.pa.dec.com!kolling From: kolling@pa.dec.com (Karen Kolling) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: DEC Alumni Date: 19 Nov 1996 19:11:37 GMT Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 12 Message-ID: <56t0p9$3le@src-news.pa.dec.com> References: <56ra89$cns@synthemesc.insync.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: sweetie.pa.dec.com In article <56ra89$cns@synthemesc.insync.net>, spring1@insync.net (spring1) writes: |> |> How do ex-DEC folks keep in touch? Is there a DEC alumni newsgroup or mailing |> list somewhere? It would be nice to keep up with events like the above... See http://www.decalumni.com. I don't subscribe to their newsletter myself, so I dunno how informative it is. Various small Dec groups that were TFSOed en masse have private email lists for their groups. Karen Article 2230 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news1.digital.com!pa.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!alingo.zk3.dec.com!werme From: werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com (Eric Werme) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 21 Nov 96 18:55:45 GMT Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 52 Message-ID: References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <56q40j$qla$1@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> <56qlhl$ite@agate.berkeley.edu> <56r78v$ab0@bonkers.taronga.com> Reply-To: werme@zk3.dec.com NNTP-Posting-Host: alingo.zk3.dec.com Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2230 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81298 [Cross-posted to comp.os.linux.advocacy, original thread in alt.sys.pdp10] peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >>Somebody cannibalized a genuine PDP-10 in order to make a toy >>for the Evil Emperor? Boo! >At least they snuck a UNIX box in under his very nose. >(I know, I know, UNIX isn't in good odor in this court... but lord it's > got way more hack value than "NT". I've worked on Unix now for longer than I worked on PDP-10s (people have gotten inured to me muttering about TOPS-10 doing this or that better). It's a living, even a pretty enjoyable one, especially when Alliant Computer was a healthy company (half the OS group had lots of -10 experience, even ITS!) I don't have time to pursue Linux issues (surprising what a wife and a 6-year old expect out of an old hacker), but I think we should support Linux loudly. One of the things that really helped DEC was that we shipped TOPS-10 source, this let us hire some very good people who were instantly productive. We also sold PDP-10s at an educational discounts, so we had a steady stream of young, skilled and enthusiastic monitor programmers to hire. Trying to hire people for Digital Unix development has been remarkably frustrating. A lot of college grads seem to learn C++ under windows and have next to no idea what debugging a kernel race condition is all about. I'm looking forward to seeing resumes with Linux experience. It seems to me that Linux not only will help Unix vendors hire talented folks without raiding other vendors, but also offers a chance to implement some TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 features in Unix. For example, I've always have been fond of the I/O buffer structure of TOPS-10 I/O. It provided a means to do read ahead for all devices (Unix readahead is generally a per-device or per-file system design). I've long thought it would be fun to get that into Unix and stdio, but I can't justify doing that here. And even if I did, what could I do with the code? (Actually, we and other Unix vendors are beginning to do Direct I/O for transferring large files with little overhead and bypassing the cache, so there might actually *be* something I could do with it!) Doing that in Linux would be easier (all our high performance code makes almost anything harder to do than in FreeBSD or Linux), and easily sharable, and possibly even worthwhile. For example, TOPS-10's buffered I/O would be ideal for something like a MPEG viewer. So, how about it? What else to people miss most about PDP-10 OS design that would be worth writing to a demo-level in Linux? -- <> Eric (Ric) Werme <> This space under reconstruction <> <> <> <> Article 2233 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!ddsw1!news.mcs.net!newspump.sol.net!iag.net!enews.sgi.com!news.mathworks.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-feed2.bbnplanet.com!transfer.stratus.com!sw.stratus.com!moser From: moser@sw.stratus.com (Tom Moser) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 22 Nov 1996 01:03:33 GMT Organization: Stratus Computer, Inc. Lines: 89 Distribution: world Message-ID: <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <56r78v$ab0@bonkers.taronga.com> <3294B8B0.3A9C@zso.dec.com> <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: iconoclast.sw.stratus.com Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2233 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81318 In article <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu>, bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) writes: > >Eric Werme wrote: > >> So, how about it? What else to people miss most about PDP-10 OS design > >> that would be worth writing to a demo-level in Linux? > > I missed the original post, so maybe someone already said this, but the > crucial thing (common to all PDP-10 OSs, I think) is that only one person > can write a file at a time! And the old file is still there until the new Not true of TOPS-20. > file is successfully closed. Also not true of TOPS-20. If you are refering to file 'generations' then foo.bar;1 and foo.bar;2 are seperate files entirely. The OS just makes it easy to create successive generations. It is by no means required. The previous generations can also be deleted and expunged while the new generation is open. The default behavior is to keep old generations (as deleted) even after the new generation is closed. > I was really amused when they had me teach an > OS course for the first time, recently, and I learned from the textbook that > people are turning handsprings to get network filesystems, which naturally > act like a PDP-10, to have the losing Unix semantics. There is no file system, to my knowledge that even approches the capabilities of Tops-20 CFS in a cluster. Maybe in about 5 years NT will catch up to Tops-20 6.0 circa 1984 (I would not bet on it though). IMO - Tops-20 was the best operating system in 4 areas: 1. File system 2. Paging (really 1 and 2 are the same thing - on T-20 that is the beauty) 3. Software interrupt system (Unix has tried to get this right at least twice with no success) 4. Processes paradigm (if other OSs used processes like T-20 then threads would never have been invented) Many people liked the COMND% JSYS but that was really a user program and is available for unix today. Same goes for the EXEC - it was really just a user program and had nothing to do with the OS. I never really loved the EXEC anyway and used replaced the EXEC with Emacs as my 'shell'. Tops-20 had 4 big problem areas also: 1. Not portable (if only we had rewritten it in PASCAL or something - sigh - believe me C was not a possibility) 2. Limited directory structure. (easy to fix) 3. device specificity (no good pipes - PTYs do not count) 4. Limited software interrupt system (the best I have seen but it could have been better - also easy to fix). Since we are on the subject of good/bad OS features the worst features of Unix are: 1. Written in one of the suckiest languages of all time (C) 2. Software interrupts do not work. 3. Scheduler is a joke (and they are SO proud of it) 4. Threads (even some of the plan 9 developers say that if processes on Unix worked better then they would never have done threads) 5. Streams - what a horrible, evil, nasty, slow, heavyweight way to do something that should be simple, pure and beautiful. Streams alone should deter anyone from using unix. Again - they are SO PROUD OF IT - gag. OTOH - Pipes (and the pipe paradigm) are pretty cool. NT is just a bunch of ripped off ideas running on a PC. Plug and Play is a nice idea though. So are DLLs but Tops-20 had those in the works when the plug got pulled. DOS and Windows do not count as Operating systems. I believe that if Tops-20 had been ported to a different architecture then we would not be using Unix or NT today. -Tom Moser (Former Principal SW Engineer - Tops-20 monitor '80-85) PS: I still believe that the world is waiting for someone to write an adequate OS (again). Certainly Unix and NT are not that OS. When I left DEC in 1985 we (T-20 engineering) were poised to write something better than T-20, T-20 and Unix (and VMS) compatable incorporating ideas that I STILL have never seen discussed in any other context. Dave Cutler pulled the plug on that project. Article 2239 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in3.uu.net!world!bzs From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 In-Reply-To: peter@taronga.com's message of 21 Nov 1996 21:56:50 -0600 Message-ID: Sender: bzs@world.std.com Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.1 References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <3294B8B0.3A9C@zso.dec.com> <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <5738a2$pnl@bonkers.taronga.com> Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 16:28:29 GMT Lines: 38 Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2239 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81366 From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) >If you opened a specific port by opening "/dev/tcp/25" (say) then you could >do "chmod 700 /dev/tcp/25; chown mail /dev/tcp/25" and sendmail could run >unprivileged. The TOPS-20 TCP implementation we used (BBN?) did something like this. Basically, the problem is all the possible options, like is your /dev/tcp/25 example a server or client open? Right there it begins to go down the rathole. Put another way, there's been absolutely nothing stopping someone from putting together a library which implements the above sort of thing. As I remember people have tried from time to time these past 15 or thereabouts years and it always went down a rathole, but I wouldn't discourage someone from trying again (well, maybe I just did, a little, but hey.) Anyone remember the TOPS-20 TCP I'm referring to well enough to generate a reasonably common but hairy example? I remember you'd often put things like timeout values into the "filename" string. In the end it becomes just a sort of interpreter that happened to pass through the OPEN call, but really didn't have a lot to do with the file system, it may as well have been lisp code (hey there you go, open("/dev/lisp/(connect (socket :TCP) ((getservbyname "telnet") :port))", O_RDWR); :-) -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | http://www.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD Article 2240 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!darin From: darin@connectnet1.connectnet.com (Darin Johnson) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 22 Nov 1996 19:00:27 GMT Lines: 100 Message-ID: References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <56r78v$ab0@bonkers.taronga.com> <3294B8B0.3A9C@zso.dec.com> <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: connectnet1.connectnet.com X-Newsreader: slrn (0.8.8 UNIX) Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2240 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81375 >IMO - Tops-20 was the best operating system in 4 areas: > > 1. File system And, this is something that can get into UNIX or NT to a degree, without breaking stuff. The big problem with UNIX is that you can't change it too much or people scream and yell and programs break. I remember when shared libraries were considered just a silly thing Sun was doing and ran into people that were strongly opposed to them. But a file system could change and not break too much; except of course if the semantics change to be non-POSIX... A big reason to have a new OS; NT could be it, but they've got their own baggage. > 2. Paging (really 1 and 2 are the same thing - on T-20 that > is the beauty) Yep. It had the hardware too. Much of the problems with UNIX paging come from it being designed on computers with some missing features (VAXen had a lot of VM support in hardware, but oddly no LRU, which if present would have eliminated the need for the clock algorithm). > 3. Software interrupt system (Unix has tried to get this right > at least twice with no success) I never liked this either, and I'm a big UNIX fan. (am I the only UNIX fan that even sees UNIX flaws?) VMS's AST system was so much cleaner and easier to work with; NT has this, but in a limited form with caveats in the docs (I'd much rather use an AST than wait on an event). And the UNIX signal rules aren't too constant (at least if you want portability with older non-POSIX) as well as being somewhat byzantine at times. > 4. Processes paradigm (if other OSs used processes like T-20 > then threads would never have been invented) Hmm, I always liked these, because they seemd *fast*. But that was relative, because I could compare them to VMS processes which were dog slow. With UNIX you could have 1 process per command, but with VMS they had to be shared (a UNIX style shell from DEC had to save processes and reuse them as well, as the fork/exec style was too slow). On the other hand, the Amiga had nice tasks/processes. They were essentially threads, but that term wasn't in vogue like it is now. Theoretically, "threads" can all be done from the user level, it needn't be the kernel's concern (heretical I know, marketting people will be upset at me). If they're done at the kernel level, then VM and processes should be divorced (ie, you turn a thread into a processes by giving it a new address space). Fork() naturally fits with the thread paradigm, and that's what fork() should create. Of course, UNIX baggage says this will never happen in UNIX. > 4. Threads (even some of the plan 9 developers say that if > processes on Unix worked better then they would never > have done threads) Actually, I don't personally put threads into the UNIX category, since they're non standard (ie, they may be in a standard, but each UNIX system I use does threads differently, making them impractical to use). > 5. Streams - what a horrible, evil, nasty, slow, heavyweight > way to do something that should be simple, pure and > beautiful. Streams alone should deter anyone from using > unix. Again - they are SO PROUD OF IT - gag. This was System V. Berkeley people thought streams sucked too. Here on the west coast, streams aren't considered UNIX, they're just a vendor enhancement that didn't work out. You don't blame all of UNIX for something Sun or HP added that didn't work out, so don't blame all of UNIX for an ATT feature. >OTOH - Pipes (and the pipe paradigm) are pretty cool. > >NT is just a bunch of ripped off ideas running on a PC. Plug and Play is >a nice idea though. So are DLLs but Tops-20 had those in the works when the >plug got pulled. "Plug and Play" and "DLL's" are old ideas, and commonly implemented ideas. Windows didn't even make them popular, they already were popular! Just use their real names - auto configuring devices and shared library modules - and you'll find lots of other systems that have them. Even in the PC world, these were big on Macs and Amigas when Windows was just learning to boot. >DOS and Windows do not count as Operating systems. > >I believe that if Tops-20 had been ported to a different architecture then >we would not be using Unix or NT today. True. Heck, at the very least, it should have been ported to the VAX! DEC didn't understand this, even they had several OS's for the PDP-11, they were still reluctant to separate the OS from the machine. -- Darin Johnson darin@connectnet.com Article 2254 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!hunter.premier.net!news.mathworks.com!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!pfarrell From: pfarrelL@netcom.com (Pat Farrell) Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Message-ID: Sender: pfarrell@netcom21.netcom.com Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <56r78v$ab0@bonkers.taronga.com> <3294B8B0.3A9C@zso.dec.com> <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> Date: Sat, 23 Nov 1996 13:32:56 GMT Lines: 39 Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2254 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81448 darin@connectnet1.connectnet.com (Darin Johnson) wrote: >> 1. File system >> 2. Paging (really 1 and 2 are the same thing - on T-20 that >> is the beauty) >Yep. It had the hardware too. Much of the problems with UNIX >paging come from it being designed on computers with some missing >features (VAXen had a lot of VM support in hardware, but oddly no >LRU, which if present would have eliminated the need for the clock >algorithm). Tops-20 did not use a brain dead LRU algorithm. It used Peter Denning's working sets, which are vastly superior to LRU. It is true that working sets requires a tiny bit of hardware support, specifically you have to be able to set an "in use" bit for the page after you've calculated the effective address. You already know the page, all you need is either a bit in the page table, or a bit vector somewhere else. The Vaxen folks were too stuck with NIH syndrome to look at the work that was completed just 15 miles away. And those folks brought us VMS.2, aka NT. It is great to see elsewhere in this thread the comment that if Unix and NT had done processes half as well as Tops-20, we wouldn't have to deal with threads and all the half assed implementations of threads. When I tell people that Tops-20 had processes that let the programmer be protected from inappropriate memory corruption but also allowed the direct and simple sharing of data, they look at me like I have two heads. Sigh. Pat Pat Farrell CyberCash, Inc. (703) 715-7834 pfarrell@cybercash.com #include standard.disclaimer Article 2249 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!newspump.sol.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!howland.erols.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!rutgers!venus.sun.com!news2me.EBay.Sun.COM!engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM!engnews1.Eng.Sun.COM!peregrine!falk From: falk@peregrine.eng.sun.com (Ed Falk) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 23 Nov 1996 03:34:49 GMT Organization: Sun Microsystems Lines: 15 Message-ID: <575rcp$ger@engnews1.Eng.Sun.COM> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <57542m$18v@transfer.stratus.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: peregrine.eng.sun.com Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2249 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81421 In article <57542m$18v@transfer.stratus.com>, Kevin Paetzold wrote: >not use PDP10 C is the next best thing. Going from PDP10 to 68000 >assembler was a real rude awakening. ... Try PR1ME assembler someday. Eeeeee. pdp-10 machine language is the standard by which elegance is measured. -- -ed falk, sun microsystems -- falk@sun.com If there's ever a nuclear holocaust, the only things left alive afterward will be cockroaches and spammers -- Dan Gillmor, Mercury News Article 2258 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cs.utexas.edu!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!pfarrell From: pfarrelL@netcom.com (Pat Farrell) Subject: Re: What to teach? was: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Message-ID: Sender: pfarrell@netcom5.netcom.com Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.0.82 References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <57542m$18v@transfer.stratus.com> <575rcp$ger@engnews1.Eng.Sun.COM> <577cmd$irm@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: Sat, 23 Nov 1996 19:20:28 GMT Lines: 31 bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) wrote: >What I'd really like would be for some of the people who've been >contributing to this thread to write a good textbook relating the >old ideas to the new ideas and trying to teach a computing aesthetic >that's neither stuck in the past nor stuck in the present, if you >know what I mean. I promise I'd teach from it! I doubt if this is a great idea. After years as a '10 and '20 operating systems programmer, I moved on to other areas of software. Then in 1991, I took up grad school at George Mason University. I was planning on "testing out" of the required CS571 Operating Systems class until they hired Peter Denning as CS department head. Since his PhD thesis was the foundation for the beloved "working set" model used by Tops-20, I decided to actually take the course from him. Professor Denning was recognized as an expert on Operating Systems. He wrote a text book on the topic in the early 80s. He did not use his own book in the course. He said it was not sufficiently current to be interesting. He assigned Goscinski's "Distributed Operating Systems, the Logical Design" for the class. But he didn't use it much. He had us real and analyze the classic papers on operating systems from Djisktra, C.A.R. Hoare, etc. Pat Pat Farrell CyberCash, Inc. (703) 715-7834 pfarrell@cybercash.com #include standard.disclaimer Article 2252 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.sgi.com!howland.erols.net!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!uunet!in3.uu.net!usenet.cisco.com!usenet From: billw@puli.cisco.com (William ) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 23 Nov 1996 01:35:42 -0800 Organization: cisco Systems, Incorporated Lines: 32 Message-ID: <547mndyx01.fsf@puli.cisco.com> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <56r78v$ab0@bonkers.taronga.com> <3294B8B0.3A9C@zso.dec.com> <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <57542m$18v@transfer.stratus.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: puli.cisco.com In-reply-to: paetzold@sw.stratus.com's message of 22 Nov 1996 20:56:54 GMT X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.1 Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2252 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81440 As for Tom's comments about PASCAL being the language of choice for TOPS-20 implementation we should rememeber that he also thinks Fortran is the best programming language invented by mankind.:-) PASCAL as a systems programming language for PDP-10s suffered from many of the same problems that C did. The main one being a penchant for running on byte oriented machines. Of course, pascal would let you do evil things in compiler-provided functions that it wouldn't permit mere programmers to do in THEIR pascal programs (the most obvious being a variable number of arguments.) I did a little bit of work on the rutgers/etc pascal compiler, and it was pretty gross inside... Inadequacies in the languages or their implementations didn't stop many useful systems programs from being written in either pascal or C, and you could do some amazing things with little pieces of assembly language code tied in (in particular, Greg Satz and I once teamed up to do a tops-10 split-screen "talk" programs (ala ITS?) in about 1980. Greg wrote pascal code that did most of the work, and I wrote a tiny little piece of macro to allow to pascal jobs to talk to each other through the shareable highseg. (ok, amateurish stuff...)) IMHO PDP10 assembler (regardless of MACRO, MIDAS, or the one pass assembler whose name I forget) was the best language I ever used. (FAIL.) They were pretty nice. Beautiful as assemblers go, backed up by an elegant architecture with sufficient complexity to make it fun. (compared to a PDP-11, which was only elegant in a minimalist sort of way.) Sigh. BillW Article 2228 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!jimc From: jimc@zach1.tiac.net (James E. Carpenter) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Looking for TOPS-20 Date: 20 Nov 1996 18:05:43 GMT Organization: Massachvsetts Institvte of Technology Lines: 13 Message-ID: Reply-To: jimc@zach1.tiac.net NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.52.46.41 X-Newsreader: slrn (0.8.8.1 UNIX) A professor at a nearby university wants to get a DECSYSTEM 20 running but he can't find any TOPS-20 tapes. Can anybody help him out??? I keep reading about places turning off their -10s. It would sure be nice to turn one on for a change! - Jim -- James E. Carpenter E-Mail: jimc@zach1.tiac.net 6 Munroe Drive Plainville, MA 02762-1108 ICBM: 42 00' 15"N 71 20' 00"W Article 2265 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.sgi.com!howland.erols.net!cs.utexas.edu!data.ramona.vix.com!news1.digital.com!pa.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!alingo.zk3.dec.com!werme From: werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com (Eric Werme) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 24 Nov 96 17:59:48 GMT Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 39 Message-ID: References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <575atp$kfv@transfer.stratus.com> <575p3u$j2t@bonkers.taronga.com> Reply-To: werme@zk3.dec.com NNTP-Posting-Host: alingo.zk3.dec.com Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2265 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81562 darin@connectnet1.connectnet.com (Darin Johnson) writes: >>BLISS? BLISS is ignorance? >BLISS has a few good features. But C is a paragon of readability >compared to it :-) Hey guys, when I started this thread I hoped to get some ideas for Linux development suggested and bandied about. I was afraid it would go off in some rathole. Reread the subject line. Reread the Newsgroups line. Let's take the language holy war somewhere appropriate - Linux will not be recoded in Pascal, Modula, Simula, or BLISS. The MACRO-10 notes have possiblilities. One of the great uses for its macros were to created large, complex, interconnected data structures at compile time. (Once as a hack I wrote macros that took a like of command names and created a search tree. Those macros and about 10 instructions converted a command name to a pointer to a dispatch table entry for the command.) The macro expansion was immense, pretty much as I expected, and I stuck with the command decoding in the TULIP I/O package, pretty much as I expected. (Tulip is in DECUS and in FTP archives - it used the User UUOs to make an extremely nice I/O package. Its lexical analyzer used a macros to good result to generate meta code that drove analysis.) I haven't thought too much about what a CPP with MACRO-10 style macros might look like, but I was thinking the other day it would be nice to take something like a getopt() control string and use that to generate the appropriate C code. It would be pretty easy to write a MACRO-10 macro to accept extra coloration to generate code for options that take decimal numbers, strings, or even whatnot. Has any one tried writing yacc code for MACRO-10 macros? -- <> Eric (Ric) Werme <> This space under reconstruction <> <> <> <> Article 2267 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.stealth.net!solace!xinit!newsfeed.tip.net!news.algonet.se!news From: pgd@algonet.se (Per Lindqvist) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 04:10:29 GMT Organization: AlgoNet Public Access Node, Stockholm Lines: 19 Message-ID: <32988ac8.4865201@193.12.207.207> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <575atp$kfv@transfer.stratus.com> <575p3u$j2t@bonkers.taronga.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: bengt.algonet.se NNTP-Posting-User: b319c0acb8598648d93c87732e2a5b740 X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99e/16.227 Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2267 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81604 darin@connectnet1.connectnet.com (Darin Johnson) wrote: > Or a language designed for OS's. Things with concurrency and > synchronization built in. Like what they build Amoeba with, > except I can't recall the name... Professor Per Brinch Hansen designed a language called "concurrent pascal", where he added the necessary semantics, and also constructed a complete operating system and development system for the PDP-11/45, the same machine unix was running on, and I think at approximately the same time. But the compiler was an academic completely non-optimizing 7-pass compiler generating code for a virtual machine that was interpreted. The name of the operating system was SOLO. I think the design can be considered quite modern compared to the more kludgy UNIX. Maybe he was just ahead of his time. In those days operating systems should consist of a monolithic kernel. Article 2270 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.brainstorm.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!usc!usc!not-for-mail From: tli@skat.usc.edu (tli) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 24 Nov 1996 23:06:47 -0800 Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Lines: 30 Sender: tli@skat.usc.edu Message-ID: <57bgi7$qlr@skat.usc.edu> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <575p3u$j2t@bonkers.taronga.com> <32988ac8.4865201@193.12.207.207> NNTP-Posting-Host: skat.usc.edu Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2270 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81614 Professor Per Brinch Hansen designed a language called "concurrent pascal", where he added the necessary semantics, and also constructed a complete operating system and development system for the PDP-11/45, the same machine unix was running on, and I think at approximately the same time. But the compiler was an academic completely non-optimizing 7-pass compiler generating code for a virtual machine that was interpreted. The name of the operating system was SOLO. I think the design can be considered quite modern compared to the more kludgy UNIX. Maybe he was just ahead of his time. In those days operating systems should consist of a monolithic kernel. Subsequently, he revised the language and ported to the IBM PC, resulting in the "Edison" language and operating system. It was ummm primitive, but oh so simple. It was along the lines of a Modula subset. Perhaps its most major drawback was the lack of inter-module typechecking, which was quite enough to drive some of us bonkers. The key feature to the language was that each module was a critical section, and that mutual exclusion was _completely_ hidden from the programmer. No locking bugs at all. Sigh. Oh for the next generation of true system programming languages... but it will only happen after the current wave of OO silliness passes. Tony -- Good Happens -- just a whole lot less frequently Article 2271 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.brainstorm.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.webspan.net!ix.netcom.com!phase2.worldnet.att.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!world!mbg From: mbg@world.std.com (Megan) Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Message-ID: Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <575atp$kfv@transfer.stratus.com> <575p3u$j2t@bonkers.taronga.com> <32988ac8.4865201@193.12.207.207> Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 08:41:31 GMT Lines: 30 Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2271 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81622 pgd@algonet.se (Per Lindqvist) writes: >darin@connectnet1.connectnet.com (Darin Johnson) wrote: > > Or a language designed for OS's. Things with concurrency and > > synchronization built in. Like what they build Amoeba with, > > except I can't recall the name... >Professor Per Brinch Hansen designed a language called "concurrent pascal", >where he added the necessary semantics, and also constructed a complete >operating system and development system for the PDP-11/45, the same machine >unix was running on, and I think at approximately the same time. Thanks for the reminder... I used to work at a company which did application software for a system they had implemented, based on the Per Brinch Hansen book, on a set of pdp-11s. This was back in the mid- to late-70s timeframe. Megan Gentry Former RT-11 Developer +--------------------------------------+-------------------------------------+ | Megan Gentry | tcp/ip (work): gentry@zk3.dec.com | | Unix Support and Engineering Group | or: gentry@rusure.enet.dec.com | | Digital Equipment Corporation | (non-work): mbg@world.std.com | | 110 Spitbrook Rd. ZK03-2/T43 | URL http://world.std.com/~mbg/ | | Nashua, NH 03062 | "Still real-time after all these | | (603) 881 1055 | years." | +--------------------------------------+-------------------------------------+ Article 2302 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10,comp.os.linux.advocacy Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!hunter.premier.net!news.mathworks.com!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!netcom16!alderson From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 In-Reply-To: paetzold@sw.stratus.com's message of 22 Nov 1996 20:56:54 GMT Message-ID: Sender: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com Organization: NETCOM On-line services References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <56r78v$ab0@bonkers.taronga.com> <3294B8B0.3A9C@zso.dec.com> <572oem$g2r@agate.berkeley.edu> <572u55$ifn@transfer.stratus.com> <57542m$18v@transfer.stratus.com> Date: Wed, 27 Nov 1996 23:39:20 GMT Lines: 18 Xref: nntp1.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:2302 comp.os.linux.advocacy:81975 In article <57542m$18v@transfer.stratus.com> paetzold@sw.stratus.com (Kevin Paetzold) writes: >There was actually pipe code available for TOPS20 written by Randy Frank at >Univ. of Utah. I remember being asked by someone at one point to put it into >the official sources which at the time I did not do which was obviously a >mistake in retrospect. For obvious reasons, we have a lot of Stanford additions to Tops-20 in our implementation at XKL, one of which is the PIP: device (which I think was re-worked from the Utah code, but not exactly the same). Dick Helliwell has improved it to the point that the GNU utilities he's ported work right when piped together. -- Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo- logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or what not. --J. R. R. Tolkien, alderson@netcom.com _The Notion Club Papers_ Article 2286 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!news.clark.net!news.netserv.com!newsfeed1.aimnet.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.sgi.com!howland.erols.net!portc02.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 25 Nov 1996 14:11:57 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 39 Message-ID: <19961125141300.JAA16088@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com (Eric Werme) wrote: Date: 25 Nov 96 19:39:44 EST References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <3294B8B0.3A9C@zso.dec.com> <32988943.4475673@193.12.207.207> Organization: Applied Information Systems, Chapel Hill, NC Lines: 45 Xref: nntp1.best.com comp.os.linux.advocacy:81842 alt.sys.pdp10:2288 In article <32988943.4475673@193.12.207.207>, pgd@algonet.se (Per Lindqvist) writes: > moser@sw.stratus.com (Tom Moser) wrote: > > > PASCAL. Always has been better than C. BLISS would have also been a > possible > > choice but I would have chosen PASCAL. > > Not on the PDP-11. C was specifically designed to be efficient on > that machine, so that it would be possible to not have to program > kernel stuff in machine code. That ambition succeeded. > > BLISS-11 was designed by DEC for a similar purpose, but > it needed a super-optimizing compiler only running on a > DECsystem-10, and never natively on the PDP-11. > > C on the PDP-11 was never highly optimizing, but still gave good > code due to the close match with the machine architecture. > Something that can not be said about modern processors. > > I think there were no good pascal compilers at all during the > time unix was created, at least not for the pdp-11. > Just for completeness, remember that Multics (the mother of most of the "modern" operatings sytems) is written in PL/I (beginning mid-60's). The later work by ANSI Committee X3J1 included a Technical Report (not quite a Standard) for real-time extensions to the various PL/I standards. As one who worked on this project, I continue to be amazed at how clean the design is and how powerful, yet efficient to implement it is. BTW I developed the PL/I for the PDP-11. :) EDITORIAL: It is unfortunate how much of the prior art in our profession is "lost" and how much effort is wasted by each new generation of programmers as they repeat our mistakes on a larger scale but with more hype. Anyone dabbling in operating systems should have a thorough understanding of Multics and its immediate successors (e.g. VMS). A later child, UNIX, is the result of its authors not really understanding the many lessons previously learned, with many "fixes" having to be applied later. Most of the PC systems are much worse designs. arthur coston applied information systems www.ais.com Article 2292 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!news.clark.net!mr.net!news.sgi.com!howland.erols.net!agate!bh From: bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 27 Nov 1996 04:58:16 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 11 Message-ID: <57ghp8$m3f@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <328BB6A0.1E87@zso.dec.com> <32988943.4475673@193.12.207.207> <1996Nov25.193944.8877@ais> NNTP-Posting-Host: anarres.cs.berkeley.edu Xref: nntp1.best.com comp.os.linux.advocacy:81885 alt.sys.pdp10:2292 bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes: >Although I do appreciate the contributions made by previous OS's, it's >sort of pathetic the way these discussions so often trend towards >maudlin cults of the dead. There's this great videotaped talk by Alan Kay from about 10 years ago in which he shows taped demos of the great old programs, like Sketchpad and Engelbart's system at SRI whose name I've forgotten, and the early Smalltalk work on the Alto, and he says "People ask me why I keep giving the same talk over and over. I'll stop when I can buy software as good as this." We aren't there yet. Article 2316 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.sgi.com!news-out.microserve.net!news-in.microserve.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-dc-2.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-pull.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-stk-3.sprintlink.net!news.wwa.com!news From: jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Looking for DECsystem-2020 Date: 1 Dec 1996 17:43:56 GMT Organization: WorldWide Access (tm) - Chicagoland Internet Services (http://www.wwa.com) Lines: 51 Message-ID: <57sg4s$7q9@kirin.wwa.com> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pool12-007.wwa.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.99.8 (x86 32bit) In article , grturner@netcom.com says... > >Pat Farrell (pfarrelL@netcom.com) wrote: >: grturner@netcom.com (George Turner) wrote: >: >ADP Network Services used to re-sell the KS-2020 as the "ADP OnSite". Who >: >knows somebody might have an OnSite in storage and not know what it is. >: >ADP was famous for taking K* processors and running their own OS that >: >was pretty far off from TOPS-xx, but I don't recall how much hacking they >: >did to the 2020. > >: Do you have any idea how many OnSites were sold? > >I left ADP right when they were announced, ~1978. I don't think that they >sold many. They may have sold a few to General Motors. As I recall, at the high water mark we (ADP Network Services) were running something like 80 KS-10s. These were pretty evenly split between ADP/Onsites running at client sites and those we ran for the client in our data center in Ann Arbor. >: Are there production numbers for KS output? > >I haven't any. > >: Did DEC ever sell the KS with TOPS0-10? I know that they sold it >: with Tops-20, and ADP's OS was derived from TOPS-10. Were there >: any KS-10s? > >I don't believe that TOPS-10 ever ran on the KS, but not sure. ADP's OS >was based on TOPS-10 and had a BASIC look and feel. I never did get to >play with an OnSite, but I'm guessing that ADP made it look like the 10's >back in Ann Arbor. TOPS-10 certainly ran on the KS-10. How do I know? I did the portation myself over the winter '77-'78 at DEC's Marlboro plant (even though I was an ADP employee at the time). ADP's operating system WAS TOPS-10, the BASIC look and feel was provided by a user interface (today we'd call it a shell) called CL (Command Language) written by Cyphernetics before they were acquired by ADP. Users with high enough privileges could exit CL and get to the TOPS-10 command interpreter. To answer some questions posed in other postings, the DECsystem-2020 (based on the KS-10 processor) was introduced in 1978, at just about the same time as the first VAX. The systems sold directly by DEC mostly ran TOPS-20. I'm not sure if DEC ever directly sold any TOPS-10 machines, although all the ones OEMed to ADP ran TOPS-10. -- jeverett@wwa.com (John V. Everett) http://www.wwa.com/~jeverett Article 2320 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!phase2.worldnet.att.net!newsadm From: david.razler@postoffice.worldnet.att.net (David M. Razler) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Looking for DECsystem-2020 Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 01:58:38 GMT Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services Lines: 40 Message-ID: <32a334c5.75694160@netnews.worldnet.att.net> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <32A0BC49.237C228A@crash.com> <32A21E36.CC4@zso.dec.com> Reply-To: david.razler@worldnet.att.net NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.146.226.245 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99f/32.299 | Steven M. Jones wrote: | > | | > There was also mention that DEC, in its usual marketing befuddlement, | > opted to slow down the clock on the KS10 to prevent it from appealing | > too much to the customers they wanted to sell the VAX to... | > | > Can anyone nail down the release date for the KS10? Around 1978, but can | > anyone say for certain? | > | According to Computer Engineering (Bell/Mudge/Mc.Namara) 1978 - it is mentioned in the 36-bit section in passing as it appeared the year that the book was published. The design goal of the machine is interesting: to produce a machine with the power of a PDP-6. As the first 36-bitter to be planned and built based on solid-state memory, (the book indicates that at least the initial KL-10s were core-based) this seems to have been a big example of missed opportunity. While CPU speed kept increasing, the first departure from the concepts which make big iron good came with the KL and the decision to design the machine with the fastest-available logic *and* eliminate the advantages by replacing transistors with microcode. With fast 1K solid state memory in hand, eliminating the major bottleneck in core machines (I believe even the slowest ran at least 2x faster than the fastest core), the new technology was placed into a slower machine, again designed to save transistors. The approach did not work in 1967 for the PDP-8s. It did not work again a decade later. sigh David M. Razler david.razler@worldnet.att.net Article 2326 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news2.digex.net!digex.net!not-for-mail From: doug@ss1.digex.net (Doug Humphrey) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Looking for DECsystem-2020 Date: 2 Dec 1996 06:03:09 -0500 Organization: Express Access Online Communications USA: 800-969-9090 Lines: 19 Message-ID: <57ud1d$fk6@ss1.digex.net> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ss1.digex.net >Yes and no. There was never a KS-10. There was only the KS-2020. >In particular, the KS-2020 CPU (in a "terracotta red") cabinet ran >TOPS-10, TOPS-20, and TYMCOM-X. (The latter was Tymshare's custom OS). KS10 was the designation for the CPU itself (just like KA10, KE10 and other option names) (trivia question, what was the KE10 option on the KA10 CPU?) PDP-10 systems had system designations which are not the same thing as the option name for a given CPU (or other) option. >The Colorado School of Mines had a single KA-10 until the middle of 1979 >when they installed a KL-1091 and a KS-2020 I saw a number of sites where they had a 2020 as a crash and burn machine supporting one or more KL10's... The power consumption on the KL based machines was huge, and having a KS around allowed you to have another CPU to shoot at without an extra acre of computer room, and an extra 400 amp 3 phase feed ;-) Doug Article 2332 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.exodus.net!news.dra.com!feed1.news.erols.com!phase2.worldnet.att.net!newsadm From: david.razler@postoffice.worldnet.att.net (David M. Razler) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Looking for DECsystem-2020 Date: Mon, 02 Dec 1996 17:31:00 GMT Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services Lines: 19 Message-ID: <32a30f48.131641580@netnews.worldnet.att.net> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> <57ud1d$fk6@ss1.digex.net> Reply-To: david.razler@worldnet.att.net NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.116.38.174 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99f/32.299 doug@ss1.digex.net (Doug Humphrey) wrote: | (trivia question, what was the KE10 option on the | KA10 CPU?) OK, what is it? K indicates it's a processor option. My first guess was that it was 16 words of solid-state memory, the accumulator upgrade, but the PDP-10 Refernce Handbook 2nd ed. designates that one KM10. And KT10 was the memory protection for timesharing upgrade (now did DEC really ever sell a KA *without* those two options?) which leaves the hardware for dual-CPU configuration as the only other K upgrade I can think of. dmr B-212s, B-212s, I've got to put bigger resistors on *all* the B-212s.... David M. Razler david.razler@worldnet.att.net Article 2328 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!newspump.sol.net!howland.erols.net!portc02.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Hobbyist license for 36b software Date: 2 Dec 1996 14:53:02 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 16 Message-ID: <19961202145400.JAA13384@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: <32A21890.507D@zso.dec.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com "Carl J. Appellof" wrote: <> I'd really like to be able to read through the 7.03 SCNSER and GALAXY <>sources once more, < References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> <57trug$9ft$1@newsy.ifm.liu.se> NNTP-Posting-Host: shellx.best.com In article <57trug$9ft$1@newsy.ifm.liu.se>, Jan Lien wrote: >inwap@best.com (Smith and O'Halloran) wrote: >> Yes and no. There was never a KS-10. There was only the KS-2020. >But I insist that my 2020's are labeled "KS-10-AB" (AB for 50 Hz 220 Volt, >AA for 60 Hz 120 Volt)! And the label is from DEC! You're right. The CPU is a KS-10. The system is a DECSYSTEM-2020, often referred to as KS-2020. The second 20 in 2020 is from the design goal of having a CPU that is 20% of the speed of a KL-1090, but much cheaper. When we had a KA-10, KL-10, and KS-10 all in the same room, we found that the KL was 6 times faster than the KA and 5 times faster than the KS. >What is TYMCOM-X like? Any copies floating around? It's gone. The last Tymshare machine was shut down in March. It was derived from TOPS-10 5.02, had paging like TOPS-20, and a DMA interface to the Tymnet network. -Joe -- INWAP.COM is Joe and Sally Smith, John and Chris O'Halloran (and our cats). See http://www.inwap.com/ for "ReBoot", PDP-10, and Clan MacLeod. Article 2334 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!feed1.news.erols.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.wwa.com!news From: jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 2 Dec 1996 19:47:09 GMT Organization: WorldWide Access (tm) - Chicagoland Internet Services (http://www.wwa.com) Lines: 77 Message-ID: <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pool11-025.wwa.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.99.8 (x86 32bit) In article , eric@brouhaha.com says... > >In article <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> inwap@best.com (Smith and O'Halloran) wr >ites: >> Yes and no. There was never a KS-10. There was only the KS-2020. >> In particular, the KS-2020 CPU (in a "terracotta red") cabinet ran >> TOPS-10, TOPS-20, and TYMCOM-X. (The latter was Tymshare's custom OS). > >As of a few months ago, Digital still had an SPD on their FTP server for >KS10 diagnostics. I haven't verified that it is still there. Also I have >an old service documentaton catalog that lists the KS10 maintenance prints. >I've never seen any reference to a KS-2020, so perhaps that was a marketing >designation. A quick history lesson. When DEC first introduced the PDP-10, marketing called it the DECsystem-10. There was to be a series of machines from the DECsystem-1010 to the -1050. The -1010 was to be a single user non-timesharing system. One of Tony Wachs' first jobs at DEC was writing the -1010 single user monitor. If memory serves me correctly the -1010, -1020, and -1030 never saw the light of day; but the -1040 and -1050 were sold. When DEC introduced the first paging -10, we needed a way to distinguish between the non-paging and paging processors in the monitor sources. We used the processor part number from the prints in our conditional assembly statements; IFN FTKA10, and IFN FTKI10; and began to refer to them as such. Since every installation received monitor sources, this quickly became the names by which they were known. The next generation -10 was the one with cached memory. The engineering team (lead by John Leng, I seem to recall) wanted their own separate identity. Even though what came to be known as the DECsystem-20 began as another DECsystem-10, the acquisition of the TENEX operating system (along with Dan Murphy) from BBN, and its metamorphosis through the VIROS and SNARK stages, foretold the emergence of what was being touted as a new product line. The engineers who designed and built the thing just thought they were building the next generation PDP-10, hence the designation KL10. There was actually a turf battle within DEC about whether or not TOPS-10 (as the PDP-10 monitor was renamed by David Stone) would ever be ported to the KL. Eventually sane heads prevailed. By the time the "small -10" was being spec'ed, the designation Kx10 for 36 bit processors was firmly established. Again, it was viewed as strictly a DECsystem-20, hence the 2020 designator. By this time I had left DEC and was working for ADP. When we were pitched the -2020 as a possible remote computing engine, only TOPS-20 was mentioned. It was clear that DEC only intended to sell it as an "orange box". We (ADP) said, "Oh yes that's all very nice, and we'd really like to order a hundred or so, but we're a TOPS-10 shop." "No worries!" says DEC. "We'll get TOPS-10 running on it in no time." Months later DEC is still saying "no worries" to ADP's management, while my former comrades in the monitor group are telling me privately that nothing's happening. At this point I get ADP's management to sit down with DEC's marketing folk and point out that since DEC doesn't seem interested in getting TOPS-10 up on the 2020, why not let me do it? So I get issued a contractors badge and move back in a couple of stalls over from my old office in MR-1. Since the TOPS-10/TOPS-20 war was still going on, and I was firmly allied with the TOPS-10 folk, I never referred to the "small -10" as anything other than the KS10, either verbally or in the sources or documentation. So, bottom line. The DECsystem-2020 was based on the KS10 processor. I don't believe it was ever sold as a "DECsystem-10", even when it ran TOPS-10. It was certainly never called a KS-2020. Note that the above is all only the way I remember it. I wrote my last line of code for the KS10 over eighteen years ago. Things could be a little fuzzy. I should point out that DEC did eventually assign someone to the project, Doug Detroy. I recall he wrote the LP20 device driver, and perhaps some other stuff. -- jeverett@wwa.com (John V. Everett) http://www.wwa.com/~jeverett Article 2348 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!newsreader.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-hub.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-atl-21.sprintlink.net!news.ultranet.com!usenet From: "Carl R. Friend" Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Looking for DECsystem-2020 Date: Tue, 03 Dec 1996 18:43:17 -0500 Organization: as little as possible! Lines: 22 Message-ID: <32A4BB15.ADB147@swec.com> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> <57trug$9ft$1@newsy.ifm.liu.se> <57vjni$cjr@shellx.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: zephyr.ultranet.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; Linux 1.2.1 i586) Smith and O'Halloran wrote in article Nr. <57vjni$cjr@shellx.best.com>: > > When we had a KA-10, KL-10, and KS-10 all in the same room, we found > that the KL was 6 times faster than the KA and 5 times faster than > the KS. This, of course, assumes that the KL's cache is turned on. I remember when I was at ADPNS I ran an experiment using the various timing diags. Unfortunately, I left the printouts with ADP when I left their employ but the diags indicated that the KL without its cache was _slower_ than a KA! What is it that they say about age and treachery? -- ______________________________________________________________________ | | | | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA | | mailto:carl.friend@stoneweb.com | | | http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum | ICBM: N42:22 W71:47 | |________________________________________________|_____________________| Article 2343 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.exodus.net!news.dra.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!portc02.blue.aol.com!portc01.blue.aol.com!newsstand.cit.cornell.edu!cornellcs!rochester!casaba.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!fas-news.harvard.edu!wjh.harvard.edu!bb From: bb@wjh.harvard.edu (Brent Byer) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 3 Dec 1996 01:47:52 GMT Organization: [guest acct] ; Cambridge, MA Lines: 24 Message-ID: <5800s8$24t@decaxp.harvard.edu> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: wjh.harvard.edu In article <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com>, John Everett wrote: >A quick history lesson. When DEC first introduced the PDP-10, marketing >called it the DECsystem-10. Sorry, but you're wrong. "DECsystem-blah" didn't enter the lexicon until very late 1968 (if not 1969). The PDP-10 was introduced in mid-1967; first ship was late 1967. We called it a PDP-10 (or just "10"). [ I worked in 10 mktg in 1968. ] >There was to be a series of machines from the >DECsystem-1010 to the -1050. John, which hindsight-historian told you this stuff? Through 1968, the nomenclature (sales literature, manuals, chat, listings,etc.) was PDP-10/40 and PDP-10/50. From another post ... Wasn't the KE-10 the "extended instructions" option (byte manipulation)? Without the option, they trapped and were emulated in the monitor. -- brent "Hey, you're a whole order of magnitude later." -- Alan Kotok, when seeing my badge #4959 (his #495) [Jan68]. Article 2346 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!feed1.news.erols.com!news.dra.com!news.id.net!news.cic.net!news.itd.umich.edu!sarr From: sarr@engin.umich.edu (Sarr J. Blumson) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 3 Dec 1996 14:27:50 GMT Organization: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Lines: 34 Message-ID: <581dd6$sab@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> <5800s8$24t@decaxp.harvard.edu> Reply-To: sarr@umich.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: 141.211.43.166 In article <5800s8$24t@decaxp.harvard.edu>, Brent Byer wrote: >In article <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com>, John Everett wrote: > >>A quick history lesson. When DEC first introduced the PDP-10, marketing >>called it the DECsystem-10. > >Sorry, but you're wrong. "DECsystem-blah" didn't enter the lexicon >until very late 1968 (if not 1969). The PDP-10 was introduced in >mid-1967; first ship was late 1967. We called it a PDP-10 (or just "10"). >[ I worked in 10 mktg in 1968. ] The systems that were delivered to Cyphernetics (later ADP) in mid 1969 still said PDP-10 on the front. I don't remember seeing anything that said DECsystem until the KI was announced. >>There was to be a series of machines from the >>DECsystem-1010 to the -1050. > >John, which hindsight-historian told you this stuff? >Through 1968, the nomenclature (sales literature, manuals, >chat, listings,etc.) was PDP-10/40 and PDP-10/50. All the glossy brochures described at least a 10/20 and a 10/30 (I feel less certain about the 10/10, although I think I remember those too). The smaller versions were missing various options, like disks, and seemed intended for single user and process control type uses. I have no idea whether any ever were sold. -- -------- Sarr Blumson sarr@umich.edu voice: +1 313 764 0253 home: +1 313 665 9591 ITD, University of Michigan http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sarr/ 535 W William, Ann Arbor, MI 48103-4943 Article 2351 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!arclight.uoregon.edu!hammer.uoregon.edu!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!portc01.blue.aol.com!newsstand.cit.cornell.edu!cornellcs!rochester!casaba.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!fas-news.harvard.edu!wjh.harvard.edu!bb From: bb@wjh.harvard.edu (Brent Byer) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 4 Dec 1996 05:23:13 GMT Organization: [guest acct] ; Cambridge, MA Lines: 69 Message-ID: <5831s1$kr2@decaxp.harvard.edu> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> <5800s8$24t@decaxp.harvard.edu> <581dd6$sab@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: wjh.harvard.edu In article <581dd6$sab@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>, Sarr J. Blumson wrote: >In article <5800s8$24t@decaxp.harvard.edu>, >Brent Byer wrote: >>In article <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com>, John Everett wrote: >>>A quick history lesson. When DEC first introduced the PDP-10, marketing >>>called it the DECsystem-10. >>Sorry, but you're wrong. "DECsystem-blah" didn't enter the lexicon >>until very late 1968 (if not 1969). The PDP-10 was introduced in >>mid-1967; first ship was late 1967. We called it a PDP-10 (or just "10"). >>[ I worked in 10 mktg in 1968. ] >The systems that were delivered to Cyphernetics (later ADP) in mid >1969 still said PDP-10 on the front. I don't remember seeing anything >that said DECsystem until the KI was announced. Thank you ... very much. All of that "DECsystem" chit-chat has bugged me, reading all these "war stories" (which, like in `real life', tend to be told the loudest by those who never really "fought"). I *knew* the word didn't exist through Nov, 1968, when I left DEC; and, though I switched from PDP-10 marketing grunt to hacker then, I stopped paying attention to what "they" called it. (I just enjoyed hacking on it.) >>>There was to be a series of machines from the >>>DECsystem-1010 to the -1050. >> >>John, which hindsight-historian told you this stuff? >>Through 1968, the nomenclature (sales literature, manuals, >>chat, listings,etc.) was PDP-10/40 and PDP-10/50. > >All the glossy brochures described at least a 10/20 and a 10/30 (I >feel less certain about the 10/10, although I think I remember those >too). The smaller versions were missing various options, like disks, >and seemed intended for single user and process control type uses. I >have no idea whether any ever were sold. I didn't mean the (above) "PDP-10/40 and PDP-10/50" to be exclusive; just that those were the two models that we commonly shipped. Also, as I racked my brain trying to remember the distinguishing characteristics of the 10/20 & 10/30, I blanked; I do believe John was correct that the 10/10 was (supposed to be) a single-user system (no prot/rel regs). I don't believe any 10/10s ever shipped -- given that the option (KT-10 ??) was < $10K, and even a minimal KA-10 + (1) MB-10 was > $130K, it looks like a lose. Gratuitous anecdote: During 1968, it was fairly common for a customer to visit Maynard while their system was going through manufacturing and final check-out. A doctor from Max Planck Institute, in Germany, was in for a visit, and I took him out to the floor to see, and actually use, his machine. It wasn't yet ready for anything "serious", so I fired up ELIZA [ (WORKER) HELLO ] and sat him down at the KSR-35 : 10: HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE STATE YOUR PROBLEM. Cust: I DON'T HAVE ANY PROBLEMS. 10: IS IT BECAUSE YOU DON'T HAVE ANY PROBLEMS THAT YOU CAME TO ME? [ We all cracked up. ] -- brent "Hard works pays off in the end, but laziness pays off *now*." Article 2353 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!newspump.sol.net!howland.erols.net!portc02.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 4 Dec 1996 13:45:11 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 54 Message-ID: <19961204134600.IAA00202@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: <581dd6$sab@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com sarr@engin.umich.edu (Sarr J. Blumson) wrote: , wrote: <>In article <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com>, John Everett <>wrote: >> <>>A quick history lesson. When DEC first introduced the PDP-10, marketing <>>called it the DECsystem-10. <> <>Sorry, but you're wrong. "DECsystem-blah" didn't enter the lexicon <>until very late 1968 (if not 1969). The PDP-10 was introduced in <>mid-1967; first ship was late 1967. We called it a PDP-10 (or just "10"). <>[ I worked in 10 mktg in 1968. ] < Sender: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com Organization: NETCOM On-line services References: <581dd6$sab@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> <19961204134600.IAA00202@ladder01.news.aol.com> Date: Wed, 4 Dec 1996 20:28:39 GMT Lines: 27 I'm glad that /BAH spoke up, as my history with these beasts starts with a -20. I have in my position a 1971 average-phonebook-sized document with the title [d] [i] [g] [i] [t] [a] [l] pdp10 reference handbook on the spine, with the year 1971 at the bottom. (The front cover, and a couple of pages like the title page, are missing.) Chapter 1 of Book 3, "Communica- ting with the Monitor: TOPS-10 Monitor Manual", starts with the text The PDP-10 Timesharing System allows many independent user programs to share the facilities of a single PDP-10 computer. My 1972 _decsystem10 users handbook_ still has "pdp10" on the title pages of several sections. A manual (or section) that I can't locate right now had a description of all 5 monitor variants, 10/10 through 10/50, in terms of minimum core needed and the like. I'll try to find that later. -- Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo- logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or what not. --J. R. R. Tolkien, alderson@netcom.com _The Notion Club Papers_ Article 2345 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!newspump.sol.net!howland.erols.net!EU.net!Norway.EU.net!sn.no!usenet From: blarsen@sn.no (Bjorn Hell Larsen) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: Tue, 03 Dec 1996 10:59:39 GMT Organization: Home, sweet home Lines: 28 Message-ID: <32a4dc21.1083321@news.sn.no> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: stavanger4-9.ppp.sn.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99f/32.299 In <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com>, jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett) wrote: > A quick history lesson. When DEC first introduced the PDP-10, marketing > called it the DECsystem-10. There was to be a series of machines from the > DECsystem-1010 to the -1050. The -1010 was to be a single user > non-timesharing system. One of Tony Wachs' first jobs at DEC was writing the > -1010 single user monitor. If memory serves me correctly the -1010, -1020, > and -1030 never saw the light of day; but the -1040 and -1050 were sold. Ok, since we're in session for history lessons. I used to work at the University of Oslo in Norway. They purchased a single-CPU DECsystem-10/KL10 i 1976, and upgraded to a dual KL10 SMP system in 1978. I seem to recall that the name used for the SMP configuration was DECsystem-1077. Why? How many other configurations were there? Also: It was not until after the demise of our DEC-10 ('87-ish) that I started hearing of tri-SMP systems. How many were there of these beasts? When did they start making them? Bjørn -- Bjorn Hell Larsen As always, I speak for me, and me alone http://home.sn.no/home/blarsen/ Dr. No Article 2352 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!portc02.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 4 Dec 1996 13:27:56 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 56 Message-ID: <19961204132900.IAA29756@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: <32a4dc21.1083321@news.sn.no> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com blarsen@sn.no (Bjorn Hell Larsen) asked: References: <32a4dc21.1083321@news.sn.no> <19961204132900.IAA29756@ladder01.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: stavanger6-13.ppp.sn.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99f/32.299 In <19961204132900.IAA29756@ladder01.news.aol.com>, jmfbah@aol.com wrote: > This 5-CPU system > used Ampax (sp?) memory which allowed all CPUs to port into each box. Ampex. We upgraded from 1Mw core memory (I think - I seem to remember four banks of 256Kw each) to 2Mw Ampex transistor memory in '84. > We did run SMP on the KI but I don't remember if we supported it. By the > time we shipped 7.01, there was no more manufacture of KIs--the KLs had > been out for years. Peter Låthberg (sp?) from Stacken Computer Club in Stockholm, Sweden, once set up a hybrid KI/KL Tri-SMP system. Rumor has it that it required a bit of hardware trickery, but I'm unclear on how much work it was. Bjørn -- Bjorn Hell Larsen As always, I speak for me, and me alone http://home.sn.no/home/blarsen/ Dr. No Article 2360 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!nntp.uio.no!usenet From: kborge@ulrik.uio.no (Knut Borge) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 4 Dec 1996 21:44:31 GMT Organization: University of Oslo, Norway Lines: 11 Sender: kborge@ask.uio.no Message-ID: <584rbv$36l@ratatosk.uio.no> References: <32a4dc21.1083321@news.sn.no> <19961204132900.IAA29756@ladder01.news.aol.com> <32aa3145.22882711@news.sn.no> NNTP-Posting-Host: ask.uio.no In-reply-to: blarsen@sn.no's message of Tue, 03 Dec 1996 13:59:25 GMT >(I think - I seem to remember four banks of 256Kw each) Ouch, this is really a long time ago, but are you sure? I _think_ I remember 192KW in one refrigerator-style chassis. >Peter Låthberg (sp?) Peter Löthberg (http://www.stacken.kth.se/stacken/showmembers.html). Knut [25,2575] Article 2342 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!mindcrime.corp.ef.net!news1.crl.com!nntp.crl.com!newshub.cts.com!atmnet.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cs.utexas.edu!howland.erols.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!arclight.uoregon.edu!enews.sgi.com!decwrl!pa.dec.com!src.dec.com!sweetie.pa.dec.com!kolling From: kolling@sweetie.pa.dec.com (Karen Kolling) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Looking for DECsystem-2020 Date: 2 Dec 1996 20:42:16 GMT Organization: OrgFreeware Lines: 15 Distribution: world Message-ID: <57vev9$fd2$1@src-news.pa.dec.com> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <32A0BC49.237C228A@crash.com> Reply-To: kolling@sweetie.pa.dec.com (Karen Kolling) NNTP-Posting-Host: sweetie.pa.dec.com In article <32A0BC49.237C228A@crash.com>, "Steven M. Jones" writes: |> |> I have also received word that the KS10 is able to run TOPS-10, TOPS-20, |> and ITS. I have been told that the ADP/Onsite systems were running |> TOPS-10. |> |> Can anyone nail down the release date for the KS10? Around 1978, but can |> anyone say for certain? I worked on the port of Tymshare's OS (Son of Tops-10) to the KS10. Grubbing back into an old resume, this was in late 1977/early 1978. I'm not certain at what point a 2020 actually arrived; we may have been coding from manual descriptions for some time. Article 2349 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!arclight.uoregon.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!loki.asymetrix.com!usenet From: "Paul Allen" Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Many -10 questions Date: 4 Dec 1996 00:49:48 GMT Organization: PAG Lines: 26 Message-ID: <01bbe17f$6184a600$64afdcc0@rodan.vnw.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.220.175.100 X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1155 As someone who spent many hours working on -10s and -20s in the 70s and 80s, I am very heartened to find out that there are still a few enthusiasts out there keeping the legacy of these systems (and software) alive. A few questions: Are there any -10s or -20s out there capable of reading old Dectapes? What is the likelihood that are still readable? Is the KLH emulator real? What happened to the author? Has anyone looked at creating an emulator that mapped UUOs and JSYSs to the appropriate windows or unix calls, thus eliminating the need to recreate that base level hardware I/O emulations? (that way you could run an old TECO under a contemporary os within the emulator and feed it already existing files directly.) I do find the question of 10/20 emulation somewhat ironic since I wrote 8008/8080/8086 emulators for the 10, and this is basically the reverse..... Is there another source for the old 10/20 Decus tapes on the net besides the one on ftp://ftp.dbit.com/pub/pdp10 ? The files are protected..... Thanks in advance.... Paul Allen PS: I have had a chance to try loggin on to an XKL system and it appears to work well. Article 2364 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!uunet!in3.uu.net!199.0.65.182!news-in.tiac.net!posterchild!news@tiac.net From: Alan Bawden Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ADP OnSites (was: Looking for DECsystem-2020) Date: 05 Dec 1996 00:55:01 -0500 Organization: ITS Preservation Society Lines: 25 Sender: alan@curry.epilogue.com Message-ID: <5Dec1996.005400.Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57sg4s$7q9@kirin.wwa.com> <57vo4p$315@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> <58554b$di2@shellx.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: oolong.camellia.org In-reply-to: inwap@best.com's message of 4 Dec 1996 16:31:07 -0800 X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.1 In article <58554b$di2@shellx.best.com> inwap@best.com (Smith and O'Halloran) writes: >I always had the impression that there were some microcode hacks >involved as well. There was only one version of microcode for the KS-10; it was the same for TOPS-10 and TOPS-20. True. But... Certainly the same microcode image was used for both Tops-10 and -20, but there was a mode-bit somewhere that selected which of two totally separate microcode routines handled the fault. So in some sense, there -was- some Tops-10 specific microcode hackery. (Eventually, microcode space got so tight that DEC introduced a microcode assembly-time switch so that they could select which kinds of paging were supported -- I don't know which possible images were actually used.) I used the Tops-10 page refill microcode as my model when I wrote the ITS page refill microcode. It was a real lifesaver that it was so separate from the Tops-20 microcode -- it meant that I could see what gyrations I had to make the micromachine perform without first having to understand all about Tops-20 paging! -- Alan Bawden Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU 617/492-7274 06BF9EB8FC4CFC24DC75BDAE3BB25C4B Article 2366 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!portc02.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ADP OnSites (was: Looking for DECsystem-2020) Date: 5 Dec 1996 13:33:34 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 9 Message-ID: <19961205133500.IAA27214@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: <58554b$di2@shellx.best.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com inwap@best.com (Smith and O'Halloran) wrote: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ADP OnSites (was: Looking for DECsystem-2020) Date: Thu, 05 Dec 1996 09:59:25 -0800 Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 13 Message-ID: <32A70D7D.1DE0@zso.dec.com> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57sg4s$7q9@kirin.wwa.com> <57vo4p$315@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: chmist.zso.dec.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (WinNT; I) Sarr J. Blumson wrote: > > In article <57sg4s$7q9@kirin.wwa.com>, John Everett wrote: > I always had the impression that there were some microcode hacks > involved as well. I'll bet there WERE some microcode hacks when ADP built their SMP KS10 system! -- Carl Appellof not speaking for Digital Equipment Corporation Article 2363 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.mindspring.com!mindspring!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!howland.erols.net!dciteleport.com!worldnet.att.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!199.232.56.18!news.ultranet.com!usenet From: "Carl R. Friend" Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: Wed, 04 Dec 1996 20:12:51 -0500 Organization: as little as possible! Lines: 25 Message-ID: <32A62193.8A0EAC0@swec.com> References: <581dd6$sab@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> <19961204134600.IAA00202@ladder01.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: zephyr.ultranet.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; Linux 1.2.1 i586) jmfbah@aol.com wrote in article Nr. <19961204134600.IAA00202@ladder01.news.aol.com>: > [...] we had to go through all of our DECtapes and change > PDP-10 to DECSYSTEM-10. Later we had to go back and change DECSYSTEM-10 > to DECsytem10 because of a trademark infringement lawsuit brought against > us by Singer sewing machine company; I can never rememer which way it > was--with/out the dashes and I seem to remember that the capitalization > was pretty important, too. If it's of any assistance, an original DECsystem10 nameplate I have hanging in my kitchen says: "DECsystem10". No spaces, no hyphens. Singer's argument was about the SYSTEM-10, which they had trademarked previously to DEC's use of the DECSYSTEM moniker. Sounds a little like DEC and its 32-bit line and the British manufacturer of vacuum cleaners. -- ______________________________________________________________________ | | | | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA | | mailto:carl.friend@stoneweb.com | | | http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum | ICBM: N42:22 W71:47 | |________________________________________________|_____________________| Article 2365 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!usc!usc!not-for-mail From: tli@skat.usc.edu (tli) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 4 Dec 1996 23:10:24 -0800 Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Lines: 11 Sender: tli@skat.usc.edu Message-ID: <585sh0$48c@skat.usc.edu> References: <32a4dc21.1083321@news.sn.no> <19961204132900.IAA29756@ladder01.news.aol.com> <32aa3145.22882711@news.sn.no> NNTP-Posting-Host: skat.usc.edu Peter Låthberg (sp?) from Stacken Computer Club in Stockholm, Sweden, once set up a hybrid KI/KL Tri-SMP system. Rumor has it that it required a bit of hardware trickery, but I'm unclear on how much work it was. Peter says that the KL was running as a KI, so it was three KI's. This was preferred as it gave more blinking lights. Tony -- Good Happens -- just a whole lot less frequently Article 2362 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!dciteleport.com!worldnet.att.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!199.232.56.18!news.ultranet.com!usenet From: "Carl R. Friend" Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: Wed, 04 Dec 1996 20:07:14 -0500 Organization: as little as possible! Lines: 41 Message-ID: <32A62042.CF99C1B@swec.com> References: <32a4dc21.1083321@news.sn.no> <19961204132900.IAA29756@ladder01.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: zephyr.ultranet.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; Linux 1.2.1 i586) jmfbah@aol.com wrote in article Nr. <19961204132900.IAA29756@ladder01.news.aol.com>: > > I have a poster that is the configuration of one of our customers. They > bought a lot of hardware; so, when they wanted to put 5 CPUs together to > run TOPS10, marketing ignored the support issue. Just as a side note, the > limitation of the number of CPUs supported was memory. This 5-CPU system > used Ampax (sp?) memory which allowed all CPUs to port into each box. It was Ampex memory, the same folks who made (make?) industrial- strength videotape equipment. It had 8 ports available on each box. Of course, so did the MG- and MH-10s but the third-party memory may have been cheaper. > DEC did not manufacture memory (they had cancelled the memory project > when the first wave of "no more TOPS10" sentiments graced our lives) > that would port to all the CPUs. If large enough memory boxes were used _and_ 4-way interleaved only one K-bus from each KL (yech) needed to connect to any given memory. The caveat in this is that each of the "boxes" had to be of identical size, and if a bank in one had to be cut-out, the same bank in all _four_ would have to go. Obviously, data-channel lines had to connect through all the memory. It was a slick configuration. > We did run SMP on the KI but I don't remember if we supported it. By the > time we shipped 7.01, there was no more manufacture of KIs--the KLs had > been out for years. At ADP in 1983, if I recall correctly, we configured a quad KI system around the 7.01 monitor in which two of the CPUs had active I/O busses. It was a lovely system! -- ______________________________________________________________________ | | | | Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin) | West Boylston | | Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast | Massachusetts, USA | | mailto:carl.friend@stoneweb.com | | | http://www.ultranet.com/~engelbrt/carl/museum | ICBM: N42:22 W71:47 | |________________________________________________|_____________________| Article 2368 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!mr.net!data.ramona.vix.com!news1.digital.com!pa.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!alingo.zk3.dec.com!werme From: werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com (Eric Werme) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 5 Dec 96 16:35:54 GMT Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 25 Message-ID: References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> Reply-To: werme@zk3.dec.com NNTP-Posting-Host: alingo.zk3.dec.com jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett) writes: >When DEC introduced the first paging -10, we needed a way to distinguish >between the non-paging and paging processors in the monitor sources. We used >the processor part number from the prints in our conditional assembly >statements; IFN FTKA10, and IFN FTKI10; and began to refer to them as such. >Since every installation received monitor sources, this quickly became the >names by which they were known. This implies that the montior folks named the machines KA10 and KI10. Perhaps there was internal dither over what letter to use in the Kx10 name, but I would have expected that to have been set early on. (Then again, I wasn't there when the KI10 was being designed.) The KL10 was the KL from the outset, same with KS10: KA10 discrete transistors 'A' because it was the first. KI10 I for Integrated circuits KL10 L for ECL logic KS10 S for small Core boxes did a better job sticking to the alphabet. (MA10 to MH10 or whatever?) -- <> Eric (Ric) Werme <> This space under reconstruction <> <> <> <> Article 2373 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!news.thenet.net!uunet!in3.uu.net!199.94.215.18!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.idt.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-pen-16.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-pull.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!news-pen-4.sprintlink.net!news.wwa.com!news From: jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 5 Dec 1996 19:08:38 GMT Organization: WorldWide Access (tm) - Chicagoland Internet Services (http://www.wwa.com) Lines: 36 Message-ID: <5876jm$bp2@kirin.wwa.com> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57tmkc$8mv@shellx.best.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pool12-000.wwa.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Newsreader: WinVN 0.99.8 (x86 32bit) In article , werme@alingo.zk3.dec.com says... > >jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett) writes: > >>When DEC introduced the first paging -10, we needed a way to distinguish >>between the non-paging and paging processors in the monitor sources. We used >>the processor part number from the prints in our conditional assembly >>statements; IFN FTKA10, and IFN FTKI10; and began to refer to them as such. >>Since every installation received monitor sources, this quickly became the >>names by which they were known. > >This implies that the montior folks named the machines KA10 and KI10. No, that's not what I meant to imply at all. I'm writing this without benefit of a net (I haven't had access to any PDP-10 documentation for years; evidence my DECsystem-10 confusion) but DEC marketing wanted the systems referred to as the 10/10, 10/20, 10/30, 10/40, and 10/50 for the original PDP-10; and 10/70 for the follow-on paged, integrated circuit -10. In conditionalizing the monitor sources we could have gone with IFN FT1050, and IFN FT1070, but instead as unreconstructed techies we chose IFN FTKA10, and IFN FTKI10 because that's what the prints said. Until the KI10 was introduced the machine was just called the PDP-10. It just turns out that over time the "techie name" prevailed in common usage, else we'd be talking about 10/50s, 10/70, and 10/90s. As I typed the above all of a sudden the FT1070 started to look familiar. Can anyone refresh my memory? Did we also use FT1070 and FT1077 to distinguish between single and multi-processor configurations? About the only regular poster here who might remember is JMFBAH, although Bob Clements sometimes lurks. -- jeverett@wwa.com (John V. Everett) http://www.wwa.com/~jeverett Article 2377 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.pbi.net!news1.rcsntx.swbell.net!news2.digex.net!digex.net!not-for-mail From: doug@ss1.digex.net (Doug Humphrey) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 6 Dec 1996 14:10:25 -0500 Organization: Express Access Online Communications USA: 800-969-9090 Lines: 26 Message-ID: <589r31$pep@ss1.digex.net> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> <5800s8$24t@decaxp.harvard.edu> <581dd6$sab@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: ss1.digex.net >>Sorry, but you're wrong. "DECsystem-blah" didn't enter the lexicon >>until very late 1968 (if not 1969). The PDP-10 was introduced in >>mid-1967; first ship was late 1967. We called it a PDP-10 (or just "10"). >>[ I worked in 10 mktg in 1968. ] My KA10 (sn 9) was called a PDP-10 - it had the manuals for the 10/30 monitor and the 10/50 monitor. The terms "Decsystem, DECsystem and Tops" were all introduced a little later. I might still have some of that doc around - if I ever find it, I will let people know. It is pretty cool to look at the really ancient stuff. >The systems that were delivered to Cyphernetics (later ADP) in mid >1969 still said PDP-10 on the front. I don't remember seeing anything >that said DECsystem until the KI was announced. No, the KA series was sold as Decsystem 10's also, but perhaps not until the time when the KA and KI were both being marketed. I have (somewhere) a book that shows photos (taken in what looks like a gymnasium) of Decsystem-1030, 1040, 1050, 1055 (master/slave dual CPU), 1070 and 1077 (KI based, 1 and 2 CPU). Doug Article 2382 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!shellx.best.com!not-for-mail From: inwap@best.com (Smith and O'Halloran) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: ADP OnSites (was: Looking for DECsystem-2020) Date: 6 Dec 1996 12:35:41 -0800 Organization: Chez INWAP (people, computers, cats) Lines: 81 Message-ID: <58a02t$po8@shellx.best.com> References: <58554b$di2@shellx.best.com> <19961205133500.IAA27214@ladder01.news.aol.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: shellx.best.com > inwap@best.com (Smith and O'Halloran) wrote: > >, wrote: >It was called extended addressing...NOT TOPS20 style paging. > >/BAH Don't forget that a 2040 with a model-A backplane was limited to a single section, yet used TOPS-20 style page pointers. That version of the KL was incapable of doing extended addressing. Same for the 2020. My point is: TOPS-10 without extended addressing and TOPS-20 without extended addressing are two totally different page table layouts. Anyway, here is where I picked up the nomenclature: DECsystem-10 DECSYSTEM-20 Processor Reference Manual AA-H391A-TK July 1980 Page 3-21, Figure 3.2: TOPS-10 Process Table Configuration (KL) Section 0 is UPT+000 to UPT+377 (512 halfwords) Funny Space (Exec pages 340-377) are UPT+400 to UPT+417 Page 3-30, Figure 3.4: Extended TOPS-20 Page Table Configuration Sections 0-37 are UPT+540 to UPT+577 Page 3-31, Figure 3.5: Single-section TOPS-20 Page Table Configuration Section 0 is UPT+540 only, MUUO and Page Fail are different Page 4-13, Figure 4.2: TOPS-10 Process Table Configuration (KS) Section 0 is UPT+000 to UPT+377 (512 halfwords) Funny Space (Exec pages 340-377) are UPT+400 to UPT+417 Page 4-18, Figure 4.3: TOPS-20 Process Table Configuration (KS) Section 0 is UPT+540 only, MUUO and Page Fail same as extended KL Page 5-19, Figure 5.2: Process Table Configuration (KI, TOPS-10) Small User is UPT+000 to UPT+017 and UPT+200 to UPT+217 Section 0 is UPT+000 to UPT+377 (512 halfwords) Funny Space (Exec pages 340-377) are UPT+400 to UPT+417 I believe that the chronological order was: KA with two-seg relocation and protection KA with BBN pager running TENEX KI paging, TOPS-10 KL, single section paging, TOPS-20 (MUUO and Page Fail keep changing) KL, with KI style paging, TOPS-10 KL, extended addressing, TOPS-20 KS, single section, TOPS-20 KS, with KI style paging, TOPS-10 KL, extended addressing for TOPS-10 >It was called extended addressing...NOT TOPS20 style paging. You're right. DEC called it "TOPS-10 with extended addressing" in the software product descriptions. And a lot of TOPS-20 people would talk about "KI paging" versus "KL paging", but owners of KLs with KI paging saw the distinction as "TOPS-10 paging" versus "TOPS-20 paging". Especially during the period of time when Exec mode was extended but User mode wasn't. In our case, we did not have DECnet, the entire exec virtual address space was still all in section zero, user mode programs were restricted to section zero, yet the UPT and EPT were changed to the TOPS-20 style without us getting real extended addressing. When TOPS-10 was later upgraded to support user programs in non-zero sections, then we could finally call it "extended addressing". -Joe -- INWAP.COM is Joe and Sally Smith, John and Chris O'Halloran (and our cats). See http://www.inwap.com/ for "ReBoot", PDP-10, and Clan MacLeod. Article 2393 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!news2.digex.net!digex.net!not-for-mail From: doug@ss1.digex.net (Doug Humphrey) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints Date: 7 Dec 1996 18:03:02 -0500 Organization: Express Access Online Communications USA: 800-969-9090 Lines: 20 Message-ID: <58ct36$3il@ss1.digex.net> References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <5876jm$bp2@kirin.wwa.com> <589ru6$pke@ss1.digex.net> <32a83f5e.2786944@news.sn.no> NNTP-Posting-Host: ss1.digex.net > >DECsystem-1077 and DECSYSTEM-2065. > I guess you can tell I logged more tops-10 time than tops-20... >How come your -10's were black? Did DEC deliver them that way? KA based machines were in tall black cabs - more like the PDP11 racks than what most people think of as dec10/20 racks. They were really very well built, weighed a lot! (I have moved enough of them over the years!) KI10 was in the same cabs I think, and maybe one of the models of the KL... Good question to the dec guys here; when DID they stop painting them black? I had some blue doors kicking around, so I know that the tall cabs went blue at some point; I think that I had a DN87 or DN76 that had blue doors on it... but I guarantee that my DC10 has black doors ;-) Doug Article 2395 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!cliffs.rs.itd.umich.edu!portc01.blue.aol.com!audrey01.news.aol.com!not-for-mail From: jmfbah@aol.com Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: Linux - the new TOPS-10? Was: Bill's PDP-10 Date: 8 Dec 1996 13:01:19 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Lines: 24 Message-ID: <19961208130100.IAA09723@ladder01.news.aol.com> References: <58c4sj$h49@agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) wrote: I can see that this is real useful in [what I call] user mode programming. <> But doesn't one get into real problems when this is in the OS? < References: <5876jm$bp2@kirin.wwa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: ladder01.news.aol.com X-Admin: news@aol.com In article <5876jm$bp2@kirin.wwa.com> jeverett@wwa.com (John Everett) wrote: References: <32AC167E.41C6@s054.aone.net.au> NNTP-Posting-Host: stavanger6-15.ppp.sn.no Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99g/32.339 In <32AC167E.41C6@s054.aone.net.au>, Mark & Suzanne wrote: > Just to be correct, from what I have read so far > there never was such a thing as a DECsystem-20 > it's a DECSYSTEM-20 and a DECsystem-10, though > from the previous messages I'm confused about the > Singer case that had DEC to drop the - . I'm sure lots > of things have for a long time used DECsystem-10 > did the case finally get dropped or something ? I don't know. But I _do_ know that on my copy of AA-H391-TK, dated June 1982, the title is DECsystem-10 DECSYSTEM-20 Processor Reference Manual I also notice that my BLISS REFERENCE MANUAL from CMU (dated January 1970) has no mention whatsoever of "DECsystem-10" - it only speaks about the PDP-10. But then, so does my BCPL manuals from the University of Essex, even though they are dated May 1980. (However, BCPL was first ported to the -10 in 1970, that may explain the choice of terms used in this newer revision of the manual.) Bjørn, packrat -- Bjorn Hell Larsen As always, I speak for me, and me alone http://home.sn.no/home/blarsen/ Dr. No Article 2412 of alt.sys.pdp10: Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!noos.hooked.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!netcom16!alderson From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III) Subject: Re: KS10 vs. KS-2020, and plea for KS10 and KL10 prints In-Reply-To: "Steven M. Jones"'s message of Sat, 07 Dec 1996 08:49:17 -0500 Message-ID: Sender: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com Reply-To: alderson@netcom.com Organization: NETCOM On-line services References: <329EB4CF.41C67EA6@crash.com> <57vbnt$71h@kirin.wwa.com> <5876jm$bp2@kirin.wwa.com> <589ru6$pke@ss1.digex.net> <32A975DD.41C67EA6@crash.com> Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 02:51:48 GMT Lines: 19 In article <32A975DD.41C67EA6@crash.com> "Steven M. Jones" writes: >"KC"? Okay, as one of the Uninitiated, what was the KC? I haven't run across >any reference to a KC processor so far... Was this one of the two canceled >models that I've heard about? (Jupiter and desktop) The KC10 was the processor designation for the Jupiter. Marketing got into theis one also: I have a number of binders in my office (one from Mark Lottor at the 1988 DEC-20 Day celebration, the others from Joe Dempster) that read "DECsystem-4050 Sales Training Seminar." I keep a lot of Toad-1 docs in them. ;-> -- Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo- logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or what not. --J. R. R. Tolkien, alderson@netcom.com _The Notion Club Papers_ Article 2423 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: nntp1.best.com!news1.best.com!newshub.sdsu.edu!news.sgi.com!news.sprintlink.net!news-peer.sprintlink.net!howland.erols.net!feed1.news.erols.com!worldnet.att.net!newsadm From: david.razler@postoffice.worldnet.att.net (David M. Razler) Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: LICUS/LIRICS online MACRO-10 training... Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 03:49:39 GMT Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services Lines: 33 Message-ID: <32acdb05.29692753@netnews.worldnet.att.net> References: <544ti14963.fsf@puli.cisco.com> Reply-To: david.razler@worldnet.att.net NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.146.132.233 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99g/32.339 David HM Spector wrote: | I wonder what happened to that beautiful old machine... I rememebr | that they h