On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 5:52 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
Qniverter
Yes, I remember the Qniverter - he wanted to test it, but we were not using LSI-11s at UCB. For a long time the communications boards were feeding him. Ken and team were great. I have some fun stories when he would show at USENIX and talk. My favorite was his talk about being careful about "foreign" UNIBUS implementations - coming from the mouth of a guy that was a if not the leading UNIBUS com board supplier for a long time. But he was right, if I remember one of the DEC (KMC-11 maybe) had a loosy Unibus implementation and you needed to be careful where you installed it. Plus, Able was the king of bus repeaters -- Ken O'h knew as much if not more about the dark sides of the Unibus than anyone. I came to trust his boards over DECs for a long time.
BTW: Emulex did some great things too. The originally were doing disk interface clones for the 11s and vaxen and eventually moved in the coms stuff. I don't remember if Ken ever did an ethernet board, but I think I remember that Emulex made them. I know we used to use the Emulex disk controllers pretty much exclusively at the time.
Clem
On 2013-05-02 21:20, Clem Cole wrote:
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:
Are you sure about Able? I can't remember seeing any such thing from
them.
Quite sure - the "other KO" designed it - Ken O'h* (I don't remember
how to spell is last name). Ken O'h formed Able after Olsen shut him
down with the CalData machine (an 11/45 clone).
The Able 16 port serial product was called the DHDM. I wish I still had
one. I do still have the doc set for them in the basement, along with
his original "Enable" card he built for us UNIX guys - which was a slick
take on a cache and bus repeater. +
Ok. I have not seen or used an Able DH-11 clone. I know they did lots of other stuff, like the Qniverter. Trying to remember who did the memory upgrade for the 11/34, but I don't think that was Able...
The DHDM could definitely do speeds of 19.2K but I think they could do
38.4K and may be higher, I forget - have to look at the prints ;-) I
put the code into BSD support the higher speeds, base AT&T used the EXT
A/B stuff. I'm pretty sure the original DEC DH maxed at 9600.
Yes, the DEC DH-11 maxed out at 9600.
As for your other comment about "enough for common use" WRT the modem
control lines - actually that was not true for the UNIX community. DZ
was short pinned++ one had enough to sort of support >>dial-in<< (i.e.
off-hook/CD detection but because if used wanted to run uucp, modems
needed to control an autodialers and thus needed to support the whole
magilla. Remember UNIX comes from the TPC (The Phone Company) - so
base UNIX had all the support for AT&T communications equipment.
The comments about "enough for common use" was about the Emulex DH-11 clone... As far as I remember, the DEC DH-11 in combination with a DM-11 provided more control over modem signalling than the Emulex clone, but the Emulex clone implemented enough for the common use case. I don't offhand remember what parts of the DM-11 that the Emulex didn't implement, but I don't think it was any parts you normally would have cared about.
But yeah, the DZ-11 is also very restricted (actually more restricted) when it comes to modem signalling. (But like I said, I totally do not like the DZ-11.)
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
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 11:29 PM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
For example the campus network on (where else?) UC Berkeley was
Ethernet all over,
Ah youth!!! Before ethernet, the PDP-11's and Vaxen were connected over 9600 baud seiral lines on the "BerkNet" (which has severally derogatory other names). In fact the original Arpanet Honeywell IMP connection was the Ingres 11/70 in Cory Hall (later DoD an BBN C30 based IMP in Evan Hall). At was all UNIX boxes running 2BSD PDP-11's and 3 then 4.1BSD on he Vax in those days.
To physically send and e-mail to the Internet, you used the BerkNet which forwarded it to the Ingress system (hosts were named A/B/C). Eric Alman wrote sendmail because he got tried of hacking Eric Schmidt's (yes Google's old CEO) and Kurt Shoen's "delivermail" program, during the mail header format wars. Eric A. being a DB guy wrote a database production language to rewrite mail headers.
As I side note,I remember helping Bob Kriddle, Asa Romberger and few others - pull the original stinger tap style UCB ethernet cable from Cory to Evan Hall. Berkeley was actually a bit later than CMU and MIT on running ethernet. The original UCB Ethernet cable replaced the BerkNet serial link. It was running the >>BBN<< version TCP/IP for the BSD 4.1 and was a connection between the Ingres Lab and the CAD lab (my guys) in Cory then into the CSRG machine room in Evans. A year or so later, Joy would create 4.1A/B/C and finally 4.2BSD some time even later starting the sockets transition. I've forgotten which boards we used. I want to say, that my memory is that we must have had a couple of the 3Meg boards from Xerox like we had had at CMU before, but since 3COM was already birthed, it may have been 3COM boards. I say this because I have memory of working with Kriddle with the funky Xerox tap (which was mechanically sometimes not great). The Xerox taps were in plan grey metal box, where as the 3Com taps were "potted" in plastic or some such material.
Clem
On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 10:32 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
Are you sure about Able? I can't remember seeing any such thing from them.
Quite sure - the "other KO" designed it - Ken O'h* (I don't remember how to spell is last name). Ken O'h formed Able after Olsen shut him down with the CalData machine (an 11/45 clone).
The Able 16 port serial product was called the DHDM. I wish I still had one. I do still have the doc set for them in the basement, along with his original "Enable" card he built for us UNIX guys - which was a slick take on a cache and bus repeater. +
The DHDM could definitely do speeds of 19.2K but I think they could do 38.4K and may be higher, I forget - have to look at the prints ;-) I put the code into BSD support the higher speeds, base AT&T used the EXT A/B stuff. I'm pretty sure the original DEC DH maxed at 9600.
I want to say it was at a sumer USENIX conference the late 1980's (Austin maybe) that a number of us tried to get Ken O'h to put the DHDM on an ISA bus, but Ken O'h did not think he could make enough money at it (he was used to PDP-11 peripheral pricing, not PC community pricing). Eventually others created the "Rocket Port" board became the RS-232C board for much of the early PC/386 based UNIX systems (I think I do still have one them)..
As Ken O'h once said to a number of us. DEC's KO taught him a lesson and he was careful to never create a processor again. DEC shut him down for >>sourcing<< the UNIBUS. His Caches/Repeaters were as far as he would go from a product stand point. A few years later, he did manage to splice a 68010 on the the Unibus, but I don't he ever sold it because he was scared of KO. I want to say he gave them to a few people to play with. I saw the board when I visited him in ~1984 but never programmed it. But I think I remember that some of the BTL folks might have had a few.
As for your other comment about "enough for common use" WRT the modem control lines - actually that was not true for the UNIX community. DZ was short pinned++ one had enough to sort of support >>dial-in<< (i.e. off-hook/CD detection but because if used wanted to run uucp, modems needed to control an autodialers and thus needed to support the whole magilla. Remember UNIX comes from the TPC (The Phone Company) - so base UNIX had all the support for AT&T communications equipment.
When modems started to add the autodial "in-band" (the @ command stuff - which was not how the AT&T 212 stuff worked), that gave you dial out - but required XON/XOFF for flow control. Trying to use an in-band flow technique like XON/XOF was an anathema to an 8 bit protocol. So the fancy modems like the Telebit et al used an out-band scheme keep from overflowing - i.e. the modem control signals of RTS/CTS used s a handshake.
In fact on the very cool things that we got Ken O'h to do on the DHDM, was connect the input (which I think I remember is CTS - I've forgotten) and the USART interrupt through an NAND gate so the processor did not get the final "data sent interrupt" until the downstream device was ready for it. This made a huge difference on PDP-11s and Vaxen.
Clem
Footnotes:
+ I did the SW support for the "Enable" when I was at Tek. Johnny since you have asked me for source, one of my earier academic papers was: C.T. Cole, S. Huxley, "A Large Address Space UNIX for a PDP 11/40" that describes it.
++ You'll have to accept this as it or send Dave Cane a note directly if you want verified. Dave as the head of the 750 project (had been part if the 780 did some 11 stuff before and thus did not realize that all the signals mattered). When Dave did the first version of the Masscomp machine he stole the modem control signals from the console to create a clock interrupt. I did not join the project until after was too late to fix that. What a mess ;-) But Dave learned, RTS/CTS was very important and did not do that again (at least that I now of).
On 05/02/2013 06:37 AM, Brett Bump wrote:
Incidentally all of today's problems are Dave's fault. Including that
sneaker or shoe lace you broke Corey and the fact that someone's cat
caused an expensive object to break.
They are NOT my fault. I have had a massively successful day that has just
been overflowing with "win".
And my cats are perfectly-behaved.
I think you have that wrong. I believe that is purr-fectly-behaved. ;-)
Absolutely. :-)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 2013-05-02 18:01, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
On May 1, 2013, at 10:32 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-05-01 23:18, Clem Cole wrote:
...The Able DH's
actually could run at faster speeds than the DEC one did.
Are you sure about Able? I can't remember seeing any such thing from them. Emulex did that, though. SC02 and various incarnations. It didn't have full modem control, but enough for the common use.
Speed was better than a real DH-11 for sure, as well as just taking one slot.
How can speed be better? DH-11s had no trouble running all 16 lines at line rate -- RSTS did that routinely. In fact, RSTS systems were used at DEC as system test controllers for that reason (with a number of DH-11 controllers, or possibly DHU-11 later on, controlling the consoles of numerous systems under test).
Bad phrasing on my part.
DH-11 runs the lines at a maximum of 9600 bps. The Emulex card could also run them at 19200 bps, using the speed code called Ext.A on the DH-11.
Johnny
On May 1, 2013, at 10:32 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-05-01 23:18, Clem Cole wrote:
...The Able DH's
actually could run at faster speeds than the DEC one did.
Are you sure about Able? I can't remember seeing any such thing from them. Emulex did that, though. SC02 and various incarnations. It didn't have full modem control, but enough for the common use.
Speed was better than a real DH-11 for sure, as well as just taking one slot.
How can speed be better? DH-11s had no trouble running all 16 lines at line rate -- RSTS did that routinely. In fact, RSTS systems were used at DEC as system test controllers for that reason (with a number of DH-11 controllers, or possibly DHU-11 later on, controlling the consoles of numerous systems under test).
paul
On Wed, 1 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 05/01/2013 11:29 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
Incidentally all of today's problems are Dave's fault. Including that
sneaker or shoe lace you broke Corey and the fact that someone's cat
caused an expensive object to break.
They are NOT my fault. I have had a massively successful day that has just
been overflowing with "win".
And my cats are perfectly-behaved.
I think you have that wrong. I believe that is purr-fectly-behaved. ;-)
Brett
On 2013-05-01 23:29, Gregg Levine wrote:
I'm not sure what terminals they used, since Cliff didn't note
that bit of trivia.
Probably the same as those starring in The KGB, the Computer and Me.
re,
/Jacob
On 1 May 2013, at 23:45, "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 05/01/2013 11:40 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
Incidentally all of today's problems are Dave's fault. Including that
sneaker or shoe lace you broke Corey and the fact that someone's cat
caused an expensive object to break.
They are NOT my fault. I have had a massively successful day that has just
been overflowing with "win".
And my cats are perfectly-behaved.
So THERE.
Hello!
They are?
They are.
That means that an individual outside your windows right now
who has been paying them to be like that is indeed doing the right
thing.
I'm fine with that. Wherever the good behavior comes from, I don't
care...as long as it continues. :)
This still does not explain why what did happen to Jordi's setup, and
what happened to Corey, and the other stuff is still attached to you.
Well I can't say much to that, I'm afraid.
I can however!
I've been busy with finishing up the odd thing here and there along with my main side project of a late-50s/early-60s cabinet phonograph.
If I wanted to, I could theoretically rig the amp up to interface with say, any system. Perhaps even VAX gear!
(Along with a sign on your back that one of the cats just put there.)
They always do that. That's as close to "poor behavior" as they get.
How's the config for this done in VMS? I'm wiling to open a simulated line to you as a test, Jordi.
I'm assuming DEFINING a circuit in NCP?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
