Area: 20 (down for another day or two)
Location: Louisville, KY, USA
Router: WOPR:: -- connected via Multinet to 19, bridge to johnny
Joe
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 4:16 PM, Fred <fcoffey at misernet.net> wrote:
Hi all:
My turn ... :)
Area: 33
Name: Fred Coffey
Location: Sandusky, Ohio (midwest, between Toledo and Cleveland)
Router: FRUGAL:: - connected via Multinet Tunnels to area 2 and 19
Cheers,
Fred
On Jul 1, 2012, at 9:02 PM, Steve Davidson wrote:
...
IAS-11 was based on RSX-11D.
I worked on that for my first job at DEC, supporting Typeset-11, which was a newspaper typesetting and advertisement management system. It was originally implemented as a turnkey product on top of RSX-11D, then ported to IAS. There was also a Typeset-8, which was created by the group right next to it and used some of the same terminals, but whether anything else carried over I don't know.
The relationship between those two was very obvious, especially since we turned off the timesharing piece and kept only the RSX compatible real time piece of IAS.
Curiously enough, it seems (I never got very close to it) that RSX-11M (and M+) were completely unrelated to -D apart from having a mostly common API (as we didn't call it yet). RSX-11D very clearly went back directly to RSX-15 -- I once saw a listing of RSX-15 lying around because it was supported very close to where I worked, and a glance at the first few pages showed lots of data structures identical in name, purpose, and layout to what the RSX-11D kernel used.
paul
On Jul 1, 2012, at 9:33 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2012-07-02 03:17, Gregg Levine wrote:
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 9:10 PM, Bob Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
...
What I am curious about is how the PDP-11s talked to DEC Net based systems.
And which ones of the R* operating systems could be confused into
doing that, and in what ways.
Well, considering the fact that DECnet was born on the PDP-11, the question should perhaps be rephrased as how non-PDP11 systems managed to talk on DECnet. :-)
If the question is more on a practical note of how connections were done, I think the original was over serial lines, but I might be wrong. Multidrop as well as some high speed links were available in Phase III, but ethernet only became an option with DECnet phase IV.
Not sure about the time frame for packet switched interfaces. They certainly existed in Phase IV, but I don't know if they were available already in phase III.
Let's see. Some history, as best as I remember it. This is partially before my time, and also partially derived from on-line history files...
DECnet Phase I was implemented on RSX. Not sure which flavor. I'd guess RSX11-M just because that's where the action was. DDCMP only, in software only as far as I recall. Probably on a DU-11.
DECnet Phase II was the first multi-platform DECnet. I suspect it's also the first that had formal hardware-independent protocol specifications. Protocols were DDCMP for the data links (point to point only, sync or async), NCP, and DAP. Also around that time some other things appeared; I think MAIL-11 (email). I'm fairly sure that predates DECnet Phase III because I vaguely remember it using UUCP style paths (foo::bar::pkoning) in that time -- which later came back for PMR support. Supported operating systems included RSX, RSTS, VMS, TOPS-10, and I think TOPS-20. Terminal emulation appeared, but in an OS-specific fashion that was basically undocumented. Network management (NCP and NML) was now part of the standard architecture and fairly consistent among the various implementations.
DECnet Phase III introduced routing, which made it useable for networks the size of the DEC internal network ("Engineering network" or E-net for short) by introducing routing: one area, 255 nodes max. Still no Ethernet, but this is when multipoint DDCMP was added. That was a bit of a dancing bear ("The amazing thing is not how well the bear dances, but that it dances at all") in my view, but it did work after a fashion. It may be that packet switching (X.25) appeared here -- I never knew much about that since it wasn't ever considered for RSTS and was essentially nonexistent in the USA as far as I could tell. Check the Phase III routing layer spec ("version 1.3") and/or the Phase III network management layer spec -- if either can be found it will certainly answer this question.
DECnet phase IV adds areas, and increases the bottom level routing to 1023 nodes max by creating a way to break up the routing message into pieces (and send only what changed, as opposed to the data for the whole network every time as Phase III did). And, most importantly, it adds Ethernet. The Ethernet packet formats are strangely different in the routing layer; this is a leftover from an earlier proposal for "Phase IV" which was intended to introduce long addresses and link-state routing; that was rejected by the implementers as being too hard and "Phase III Extended" was whipped up instead by a slight tweak of Phase III to make it hierarchical. Parts of the original "Phase IV" eventually ended up in Phase V, though not the addressing; that was replaced by OSI addressing. But things like the "lollypop sequence numbering" in the Phase V routing protocol (and in IS-IS, which came directly from there) carried over from the earlier proposal. BTW, note that OSPF was derived from DECnet Phase V routing, though the OSPF creators never bothered to give any credit for that. Supported platforms: eventually nearly all of the Phase III platforms, though some (like RSTS) took quite a while to get there.
BTW, high speed links -- by the standards of the time -- appeared around Phase II when the DMC-11 was introduced. It came in two flavors, one to support lines with modem control at up to 56 kb/s (actually, I suspect they would run somewhat faster, if you could find a modem to run faster) and the other for service within a building, running over coax at 1 Mb/s. By the standards of the late 1970s that was seriously fast, especially for PDP11 based minicomputers. It also was a strain for the microcontroller in the DMC-11, which is why that one speaks a somewhat buggy version of DDCMP. I may still have the details somewhere; it wasn't all that hard to make a standards-compliant DDCMP implementation work with a DMC-11 but it takes a few hacks here and there.
paul
On Sun, 1 Jul 2012, Gregg Levine wrote:
Now the question that's worth a full Fizzbin. How many of us here are
running under emulation?
FRUGAL:: is a real VAXStation 4000/90A
MISER:: is a real Alphaserver 255/233
THRIFT:: is a real Linux box, and so is CHARY::
The above hosts are pretty much running 24/7 as (MISER and THRIFT at least) are used to do real and hobby work.)
CHEAP:: was a real VAXStation 4000/VLC, but it lost its power supply and I have not found a replacement. Would be much cheaper to run the VLC, and I am considering running FRUGAL:: under emulation at some point to save on the power bill.
Fred
On 02/07/12 13:56, Tony Blews wrote:
On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:
Ultrix I'd like to at least boot for novelty factor (to extend
my claim of having used a vast array of brands of UNIX) and maybe even
a PDP version of UNIX Sys7 or something. The former DECnets, the
latter to my knowledge does not.
I'm not the first, obviously, but I actually finished this bugger off this morning:
http://www.tonyblews.co.uk/2012/07/ultrix-pi-and-simh/
Well done for that Tony, these walk through's look really simple to do on the surface but the reality is that there is significant uninteresting grunt work to get the information out there on a web page, despite all the blogging software tool help.
We could do with a few more of this kind of thing for the more esoteric operating systems and 'layered products'. The other thing that Steve Davidson has proven too me (by being very nice in pointing out how horrendous some of my VMS setup's have been) is that getting VMS installed with some layered products compared to having a properly configured VMS machine are very different points on a long line.
I noted from my previous post that Matt has a walk through of installing decnet on RSX: http://www.9track.net/pdp11/decnet4_netgen
which might be of interest to some.
I wouldn't have a clue how to do that!
Mark.
--
http://www.wickensonline.co.ukhttp://declegacy.org.uk
On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:
Ultrix I'd like to at least boot for novelty factor (to extend
my claim of having used a vast array of brands of UNIX) and maybe even
a PDP version of UNIX Sys7 or something. The former DECnets, the
latter to my knowledge does not.
I'm not the first, obviously, but I actually finished this bugger off this morning:
http://www.tonyblews.co.uk/2012/07/ultrix-pi-and-simh/
On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:10 PM, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
On 02/07/12 06:29, Tony Blews wrote:
On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:42 AM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
How many of us here are
running under emulation?
TARDIS is an emulated MicroVAX3900 (VMS)
SIDRAT will be another one, clustered with TARDIS.
JUDOON when i get DECnet working will be an Ultrix (emulated again)
I've never quite yet gotten around to setting up a HECnet connected emulator - maybe I have a psychological block, although the Raspberry Pi is almost there, it's more about finding it a home with suitable connectivity than any software related issues.
Mine are all Pi hosted. Tardis was running fine until 2 days ago, now it runs like a 2 legged dog.
As you guys probably know, my 2 always on nodes are both on SimH
running VAX/ VMS. One is on a HP Microserver, the other on a Raspberry
Pi.
It works effectively, I even discovered that the 'bridge' works on a
Linux box that also runs SimH seemingly fine.
I've only used OpenVMS 7.3 and RSX-11M+ 4.2 in DECnet (and HECnet) via
an emulator thus far because I don't have software kits for anything
else. Ultrix I'd like to at least boot for novelty factor (to extend
my claim of having used a vast array of brands of UNIX) and maybe even
a PDP version of UNIX Sys7 or something. The former DECnets, the
latter to my knowledge does not.
--
Mark Benson
http://markbenson.org/bloghttp://twitter.com/MDBenson
On 02/07/12 06:29, Tony Blews wrote:
On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 1:42 AM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
How many of us here are
running under emulation?
TARDIS is an emulated MicroVAX3900 (VMS)
SIDRAT will be another one, clustered with TARDIS.
JUDOON when i get DECnet working will be an Ultrix (emulated again)
I've never quite yet gotten around to setting up a HECnet connected emulator - maybe I have a psychological block, although the Raspberry Pi is almost there, it's more about finding it a home with suitable connectivity than any software related issues.
I've been interested in Matt's work on providing more platforms for SIMH in the VAX arena, including simulation of graphical displays, you can see his work to date here: http://www.9track.net/simh/video/#mono
Unfortunately this is currently windows-only, I'm not much for Windows as a server-hosting platform, so I'll have to wait patiently until he gets round to providing X support.
Does anyone run SIMH on Solaris? I've recently acquired a Sparcstation 5, and I guess it's the benchmark of a usable server-type platform for me to be able to run SIMH on it.
Regards, Mark.
--
http://www.wickensonline.co.ukhttp://declegacy.org.uk
On 2 Jul 2012, at 00:03, Johnny Billquist wrote:
And isn't there some sort of Alpha in simh as well nowadays?
It's not usable yet, really. There are other Alpha emulators out there though that can be used free if you can accept limited features, slow speed etc.
--
Mark Benson
http://DECtec.info
Twitter: @DECtecInfo
HECnet: STAR69::MARK
Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.
