HECnet May 2013

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38 participants
680 discussions

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-17 22:04, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote: On May 17, 2013, at 3:48 PM, Bob Armstrong wrote: Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote: QNA is not the only horrible Ethernet interface DEC designed. The CNA (for the Pro bus) is.... Oh great, now what am I gonna do with my PRO-380?? :-) P/OS does support the CNA. And hopefully, some day DECnet/E will do likewise. Just not yet. I want to do it, but I only have about 10% of the necessary work completed. You have parts of RSTS/E running on the PRO? That would be pretty cool. Now, if I could only locate the sources for the PRO devices drivers under RSX, as well as the firmware, I could consider trying to release a new version of P/OS... ;-) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-17 21:48, Bob Armstrong wrote: Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote: QNA is not the only horrible Ethernet interface DEC designed. The CNA (for the Pro bus) is.... Oh great, now what am I gonna do with my PRO-380?? :-) Send it my way? :-) Especially if it has a CNA. I have a -380 with the bitmap and extra memory, but no ethernet. It's occasionally been on HECnet, but using a serial line connection. (BEA::) FWIW, the DEQNA (M7504) does have an 8051 - it's at the back, next to the handle and the three LEDs. Saw Paul speculate on that one. I have no idea myself, and I have always been under the impression that the darn thing was done in discrete logic. Oh well... :-) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-05-17 21:45, Clem Cole wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net <mailto:b4 at gewt.net>> wrote: How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy? Often - that was the way. There were TU58 tapes and floppies from Evans Hall that can with your 4.1BSD tapes that did the cold boot. That code contained enough of a system to talk to the tape drive. It would make sense. But I never saw such a thing with the MtXinu dist I had, which forced me to type the code in that was in the manual. :-) Maybe it got lost/mislaid or MtXinu differed... Before Kriddle and Asa would form MtXinu, a bunch of us in Cory Hall hacked to a raw boot system, and I do not remember why. IIRC it was Asa Romberger that did that hack, and he might have done it originally for IngVax. I do remember Bob would come to test it on one of my 780's (Sprite - aka UCBCAD) because we have newer/fancier/self threading 9-tracks with vacuum columns (model number escapes me) than we had in Evan. Most likely a TU77 (800/1600 bpi) or TU78 (1600/6250 bpi) in that case. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by Paul_Koning＠Dell.com

On May 17, 2013, at 3:48 PM, Bob Armstrong wrote: Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote: QNA is not the only horrible Ethernet interface DEC designed. The CNA (for the Pro bus) is.... Oh great, now what am I gonna do with my PRO-380?? :-) P/OS does support the CNA. And hopefully, some day DECnet/E will do likewise. Just not yet. I want to do it, but I only have about 10% of the necessary work completed. FWIW, the DEQNA (M7504) does have an 8051 - it's at the back, next to the handle and the three LEDs. Interesting. I wonder what it does. I would think some control functions -- an 8051 isn't fast enough to be involved in the packet handling itself. paul

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by b4＠gewt.net

On 17 May 2013, at 15:45, "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote: How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy? Often - that was the way. There were TU58 tapes and floppies from Evans Hall that can with your 4.1BSD tapes that did the cold boot. That code contained enough of a system to talk to the tape drive. The Design and Implementation book would agree. ;) Apparently utilities were included to write the image to the frontend filesystem. Before Kriddle and Asa would form MtXinu, a bunch of us in Cory Hall hacked to a raw boot system, and I do not remember why. IIRC it was Asa Romberger that did that hack, and he might have done it originally for IngVax. I do remember Bob would come to test it on one of my 780's (Sprite - aka UCBCAD) because we have newer/fancier/self threading 9-tracks with vacuum columns (model number escapes me) than we had in Evan. We had 3 780s (Coke, Sprite and Tab) in the CAD group, but big (Sprite) was one donated by DEC and was one of the only ones on campus that did not have a lot of "foreign" hardware in it - so Sam Leffler, Bob and I would use it to do tests when we wanted to make sure the "Pure Maynard" stuff still worked.

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by bob＠jfcl.com

Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote: QNA is not the only horrible Ethernet interface DEC designed. The CNA (for the Pro bus) is.... Oh great, now what am I gonna do with my PRO-380?? :-) FWIW, the DEQNA (M7504) does have an 8051 - it's at the back, next to the handle and the three LEDs. Bob

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by clemc＠ccc.com

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:13 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote: How were the VAX BSDs installed then? Standalone bootloader on a floppy? Often - that was the way. There were TU58 tapes and floppies from Evans Hall that can with your 4.1BSD tapes that did the cold boot. That code contained enough of a system to talk to the tape drive. Before Kriddle and Asa would form MtXinu, a bunch of us in Cory Hall hacked to a raw boot system, and I do not remember why. IIRC it was Asa Romberger that did that hack, and he might have done it originally for IngVax. I do remember Bob would come to test it on one of my 780's (Sprite - aka UCBCAD) because we have newer/fancier/self threading 9-tracks with vacuum columns (model number escapes me) than we had in Evan. We had 3 780s (Coke, Sprite and Tab) in the CAD group, but big (Sprite) was one donated by DEC and was one of the only ones on campus that did not have a lot of "foreign" hardware in it - so Sam Leffler, Bob and I would use it to do tests when we wanted to make sure the "Pure Maynard" stuff still worked.

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by clemc＠ccc.com

I was always accused by Roger Gourd and a few others of that typo being intentional, but I can not say it was. One of the more interesting case of where my dyslexia got me in a lot trouble. I will say it did make a stronger impact. On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Bill Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote: Was this where the dickless server line actually came from? An internet classic! -- d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: Unibus VAXen basically means VAX-11 machines. They booted either from VMB on console media, or (for the 11/750) from a boot block. No network capabilities there. They could not even boot from tape. Amen, and seemingly hard to believe. It seems so primitive by today's standards. But it actually makes sense. Disks in those days were a huge expense within the total system price, but definitely part of it. A system in the Vax class really needed to be self-supporting. So the concept of it not have local storage would have been strange and frankly not able to be sold. Let's also not forget that in those days Ethernet HW was not particularly cheap either. The 3Com stinger taps cost about $500 each, and that did not include the $~2-3K for the 3Cxxx for the Unibus. I remember when Apollo announced the "Twins" machines were 2 nodes with a shared single disk in ~1984/85 - which actually did work reasonably well. Sun did the "diskless" Sun-3 in response, and they did not. I do not think DEC even tried. The funny part is that Sun's answer was an accidental marketing genius - because it became the worlds best add in disk upgrade business for them (diskless Sun's were known as having the lack of male anatomy). I was leading the networking group at Masscomp at the time, and my team refused to do diskless support - because thought it was a stupid product (there is a infamous email I sent to all of the company with a dyslexic typo in it - which I wish I still had). I was technically 100% right. A WS-500 cost $1.5K less that and equivalent Sun 3. But, end users could buy a diskless Sun3 for $2K less than the WS-500. -- only to discover the performance sucked. So would have to go back to Sun at $5K a crack to get the disk subsystem. The genius was the sales got the original sale, and you wer not going to through out the Sun3 and get the cheaper system. You would spend the $5K later and make it better - sigh. Clem

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by Paul_Koning＠Dell.com

On May 17, 2013, at 1:43 PM, John Wilson wrote: ... The DEQNA was such a mistake. Why DEC would break from eons of tradition and make the Q and U versions of something be not in the slightest compatible is beyond me. Apparently fitting on a dual-height card was more important. I think it does have a CPU (i8051?) but its ROM is mostly full of the PDP-11 boot/diag code (since the boot is way too big to fit in a typical PDP-11 boot PROM so all that does is suck the real boot out of the 8051). So they didn't have space for doing MOP in firmware. I don't think the QNA had any form of microprocessor on it. It's basically a brand X Ethernet NIC chip, plus interface logic to talk to the Qbus. And yes, the requirement was to make it small. Remember that the only alternative at the time was the UNA, which is 6 times as big! The big issue with the QNA is not that it's different. Different is easy to handle, just write another driver. The real issue is that it's unreliable. Even after 12 revisions (ECO level L) it still didn't work right. The LQA exists simply because it had become clear that the QNA would never work, no matter how many ECOs were created for it. How much of that came from faults in the NIC chip itself, and how much from the logic around it, I have no idea. QNA is not the only horrible Ethernet interface DEC designed. The CNA (for the Pro bus) is, if anything, even worse. It uses the Intel 82586, which has a horribly misdesigned excuse for a programming interface, full of race conditions that are obvious to anyone qualified to pass Comp Sci 101. paul

11 years, 6 months

Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

by pechter＠gmail.com

Was this where the dickless server line actually came from? An internet classic! -- d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN. Don't you wish you could still buy it now! pechter-at-gmail.com On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote: On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: Unibus VAXen basically means VAX-11 machines. They booted either from VMB on console media, or (for the 11/750) from a boot block. No network capabilities there. They could not even boot from tape. Amen, and seemingly hard to believe. It seems so primitive by today's standards. But it actually makes sense. Disks in those days were a huge expense within the total system price, but definitely part of it. A system in the Vax class really needed to be self-supporting. So the concept of it not have local storage would have been strange and frankly not able to be sold. Let's also not forget that in those days Ethernet HW was not particularly cheap either. The 3Com stinger taps cost about $500 each, and that did not include the $~2-3K for the 3Cxxx for the Unibus. I remember when Apollo announced the "Twins" machines were 2 nodes with a shared single disk in ~1984/85 - which actually did work reasonably well. Sun did the "diskless" Sun-3 in response, and they did not. I do not think DEC even tried. The funny part is that Sun's answer was an accidental marketing genius - because it became the worlds best add in disk upgrade business for them (diskless Sun's were known as having the lack of male anatomy). I was leading the networking group at Masscomp at the time, and my team refused to do diskless support - because thought it was a stupid product (there is a infamous email I sent to all of the company with a dyslexic typo in it - which I wish I still had). I was technically 100% right. A WS-500 cost $1.5K less that and equivalent Sun 3. But, end users could buy a diskless Sun3 for $2K less than the WS-500. -- only to discover the performance sucked. So would have to go back to Sun at $5K a crack to get the disk subsystem. The genius was the sales got the original sale, and you wer not going to through out the Sun3 and get the cheaper system. You would spend the $5K later and make it better - sigh. Clem

11 years, 6 months

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HECnet May 2013