The terminals themselves were just largish monitors and keyboard with an LSI11 system built in (an 11/03 or 11/2 - wasn't an 11/23, they were too new).
Even if you had one now, the magic was in the software that was downloaded from the TMS system, and the server side stuff that ran on the host 11. Without a TMS11 system to attach to, it would just be a bulky LSI11 system with no disk. Now, if you added a disk, and upgraded the processor, it would be the basis for an interesting desktop system - but it wouldn't provide the real VT71/72 experience.
--
Lee K. Gleason N5ZMR
Control-G Consultants
lee.gleason at comcast.net
From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com>
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Sent: Thursday, October 3, 2013 12:07:06 PM
Subject: Re: [HECnet] VT-62?
On 10/03/2013 11:40 AM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
> A VT71 is an LSI-11 based local editing terminal -- the host would
> send the entire document to it, you'd edit it locally (very nice fast
> response editor) and send back the result.
Oh my I'd very much like to get my hands on one of those. I'd never
even heard of it.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 10/03/2013 11:40 AM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
A VT71 is an LSI-11 based local editing terminal -- the host would
send the entire document to it, you'd edit it locally (very nice fast
response editor) and send back the result.
Oh my I'd very much like to get my hands on one of those. I'd never
even heard of it.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 2013-10-03 17:24, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
On Sep 29, 2013, at 9:18 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
On 2013-09-29 14:48, Sampsa Laine wrote:
I noticed that the SIMH PDP-11 distribution contains emulation of TC11/TU56 DECtape drives. My questions are:
- How hard would these be to port to the VAX SIMH emulation?
- Do modern VMS (e.g > 7.0) OSes support DECtapes?
I figure it would be a nice way to transfer files between a PDP-11 and VAX system for example..
VMS have never supported DECtape, as far as I know
Not officially. But I know it was done as a "midnight project", by Andy Goldstein if I remember correctly. That supposedly even included overlapped seek support, just as TOPS-10 did.
Why am I not surprised he would be involved...
You might just turn it on and see if it works "out of the box".
I would assume the file structure used is the same as what RSX uses, whatever that is.
That would be normal Files-11 in that case. It might be a single directory file structure, though. Like for floppies.
Johnny
On Oct 3, 2013, at 12:03 PM, <lee.gleason at comcast.net> wrote:
Not quite. TMS-11 used VT61/t and VT71 terminals. The VT61/t is a specialized block editing terminal in a VT52 enclosure, but with a whole pile of circuit >boards full of stuff. (All single sided boards, and about 1000 jumpers to make up for that silliness.)
TMS-11 never used a VT62. They were built for TRAX, the most spectacular failure in DEC's history. (From release to retirement was a week or two.)
Maybe so. I probably conflated the 2 from remembering the the VT72/t, a slightly different VT71/t that we used. Editing on a VT72/t was a dream - I've never had a better editing environment. Multiple cut and paste buffers, and easy to use User Definable Keys, a powerful yet obvious human interface, along with a programming language that could do an incredible job of text editing. We wrote entire systems in VT72 UDK language, and it was a kick to watch it do the work automatically. Programmers at this site worked night shifts by choice, since that was when the 72/t's were free and they could use them instead of a VT61 in VT52 mode for writing code.
VT71 and VT72/t -- yes, two names for roughly the same terminal. Perhaps the VT72 had a newer processor in it, I don't remember. There was also an earlier terminal I saw in our lab but never at a customer site: the VT20. That was like a VT72, but with a PDP11/05 doing the controlling, and it had two displays on it in VT05 enclosures.
TMS-11 was the first DEC group I worked for -- travelling fixer for that team. Very neat job for a guy just out of college.
I wonder if I met you, Lee. I worked in that job from 1978 to 1980. If you had any on-site software repair done, that would have been me.
I don't think you made it to our site (Composition Resources in Houston Texas). We had several visit from a wild man of a DEC hardware support person named Skip Bollinger. Perhaps you heard of him. Apparently his troubleshooting exploits were legendary. I'd retell some but they are way off topic for this list. One of the stories involved using a rubber chicken as a PDP-11/70 diagnostic and troubleshooting aid. Vice Presidents, both customer and DEC, were involved.
Rubber chicken? Yikes. You're right, I did not visit your shop. And yes, I remember Skip, we occasionally worked together.
Good ot hear from someone else who actually used TMS-11 (and the best thing about TMS-11 - it used IAS for the operating system!). Say, you didn't save any tape copies of IAS software from back then, did you? I'm still looking for DECnet for IAS in particular.
Nope, I have no IAS leftovers at all. Actually, TMS-11 was a slightly renamed Typeset-11 which originally ran on RSX-11/D. It was then ported to IAS, but in the process all the non-RSX bits of IAS were turned off. So while IAS allegedly was a timesharing system (though never a competent one, only RSTS did a decent job there), for our purposes it was just an overweight RSX-11/D.
BTW, I have mentioned this in the past: while TMS-11 had networking technology, that was not related in any way to DECnet. I think it may have predated it. Certainly it had routing before DECnet did, using the same "hot potato routing" algorithm DECnet Phase III used. The TMS-11 version was independently implemented, around 1977, by Joe Mauro.
paul
>Not quite. TMS-11 used VT61/t and VT71 terminals. The VT61/t is a specialized block editing terminal in a VT52 enclosure, but with a whole pile of circuit >boards full of stuff. (All single sided boards, and about 1000 jumpers to make up for that silliness.)
>TMS-11 never used a VT62. They were built for TRAX, the most spectacular failure in DEC's history. (From release to retirement was a week or two.)
Maybe so. I probably conflated the 2 from remembering the the VT72/t, a slightly different VT71/t that we used. Editing on a VT72/t was a dream - I've never had a better editing environment. Multiple cut and paste buffers, and easy to use User Definable Keys, a powerful yet obvious human interface, along with a programming language that could do an incredible job of text editing. We wrote entire systems in VT72 UDK language, and it was a kick to watch it do the work automatically. Programmers at this site worked night shifts by choice, since that was when the 72/t's were free and they could use them instead of a VT61 in VT52 mode for writing code.
>TMS-11 was the first DEC group I worked for -- travelling fixer for that team. Very neat job for a guy just out of college.
>I wonder if I met you, Lee. I worked in that job from 1978 to 1980. If you had any on-site software repair done, that would have been me.
I don't think you made it to our site (Composition Resources in Houston Texas). We had several visit from a wild man of a DEC hardware support person named Skip Bollinger. Perhaps you heard of him. Apparently his troubleshooting exploits were legendary. I'd retell some but they are way off topic for this list. One of the stories involved using a rubber chicken as a PDP-11/70 diagnostic and troubleshooting aid. Vice Presidents, both customer and DEC, were involved.
Good ot hear from someone else who actually used TMS-11 (and the best thing about TMS-11 - it used IAS for the operating system!). Say, you didn't save any tape copies of IAS software from back then, did you? I'm still looking for DECnet for IAS in particular.
--
Lee K. Gleason N5ZMR
Control-G Consultants
lee.gleason at comcast.net
On Oct 1, 2013, at 12:12 AM, John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> wrote:
Even after the first 30 years, here's a dumb question: what color is
a VT52? Mine (which does work) is a nice cirty yellow, like coffee-stained
linoleum, even after a good scrub.
Standard color was a light tan. It should be in the DEC color standard that's on-line somewhere, but unfortunately a lot of those color references don't translate to anything we can now reconstruct.
If it's dirty yellow, it probably belonged to a smoker. You might try rubbing it with Windex, that does a great job removing smoke residue.
paul
On Sep 27, 2013, at 9:31 PM, Lee Gleason <lee.gleason at comcast.net> wrote:
Back in the day, in a galaxy far far away, I was system manager of a site that used TMS-11, a DEC product for newspaper/graphics arts production.
Among a lot of other DEC gear most people have never heard of, we used VT/61 and VT/62 terminals.
Not quite. TMS-11 used VT61/t and VT71 terminals. The VT61/t is a specialized block editing terminal in a VT52 enclosure, but with a whole pile of circuit boards full of stuff. (All single sided boards, and about 1000 jumpers to make up for that silliness.)
A VT71 is an LSI-11 based local editing terminal -- the host would send the entire document to it, you'd edit it locally (very nice fast response editor) and send back the result.
TMS-11 never used a VT62. They were built for TRAX, the most spectacular failure in DEC's history. (From release to retirement was a week or two.)
TMS-11 was the first DEC group I worked for -- travelling fixer for that team. Very neat job for a guy just out of college.
I wonder if I met you, Lee. I worked in that job from 1978 to 1980. If you had any on-site software repair done, that would have been me.
paul
On Sep 29, 2013, at 9:18 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
On 2013-09-29 14:48, Sampsa Laine wrote:
I noticed that the SIMH PDP-11 distribution contains emulation of TC11/TU56 DECtape drives. My questions are:
- How hard would these be to port to the VAX SIMH emulation?
- Do modern VMS (e.g > 7.0) OSes support DECtapes?
I figure it would be a nice way to transfer files between a PDP-11 and VAX system for example..
VMS have never supported DECtape, as far as I know
Not officially. But I know it was done as a "midnight project", by Andy Goldstein if I remember correctly. That supposedly even included overlapped seek support, just as TOPS-10 did.
You might just turn it on and see if it works "out of the box".
I would assume the file structure used is the same as what RSX uses, whatever that is.
paul
On Thu, 3 Oct 2013, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> writes:
On Thu, 3 Oct 2013, Mark Wickens wrote:
On 03/10/2013 03:01, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Thu, 3 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
Sweet! :-)
I'm thinking I'll stick with VMS 6.2. With patches.
I like trying appropriate vintage VMS for the machines. It's weird how the
subtle differences creep in.
It's obvious at 6.1 how much TCP/IP, for example, is a 'bolt on'. Not
required for the OS. DECnet and underlying clustering protocols working just
fine on their own. Happy days.
I like appropriate vintage OSes for systems, too. 6.2 also seems a bit
lighter.
Lighter???
I have a different definition of "lighter" than others.
FWIW, you'd be much better off running the latest and greatest on your VAX
hardware to take advantage of the performance features contained within it.
The VAX processors, even in the latter generation VAX systems, are not very
fast by today's standards. If you believe that every little bit helps, then
you'd be running V7.3 to get every little bit of help you can get from VMS.
I need to get a compatible CD drive before I can do that. Until then I shall stick with 6.2
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
