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...
The easiest way to transfer files between a PDP-11 and VAX would of course be DECnet, but in case you wanted to do it on a physical storage medium, the popular choices were RL02 or 9-track tape.
But potentially, RK06, RK07, RM02, RM03, RM05, RP04, RP05, RP06 and RA60 were also pretty usable.
And don't forget floppies...
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
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..
PPS: Arabic is a pain in the ass frankly, to write - each letter has up to FOUR versions, depending on its position in the word (initial, medial, final, by itself) and depending on the letter, it can either connect to previous and next letter or JUST the previous, which means that the next letter has to use the INITIAL form even though it's in the middle of a word...
BTW, this means that converting from UTF-8 to a non-smart terminal would require 28 x 4 (letters * positions) letters in a byte, plus maybe a control character to indicate that the text is to be printed right-to-left.
Looking at the code pages on my Mac, it seems that several of these were in fact in existence back in the day, but the Arabic keyboard on OS X only input Unicode.
Sampsa
I just realized I read a previous line of yours too quickly. I read "Both of the iTerm pass the preliminary VTTEST suites..." as "Both iTerm and Terminal.app pass...", which I couldn't get to fit with the fact that Terminal.app fail on DECCOLM.
Oh well. My fault.
Just ran VTTEST against the (admittedly old, the version has great code page support for PC / ANSI BBF 8-bit characters and other weird things I need occasionally) iTerm and it broke a lot more than Terminal.app..
Might install latest version of iTerm and run that as well.
But as I said, I have not come across any show stopping bugs in my use of Terminal.app, so until I do, I'll probably stick with it.
PS: iTerm couldn't display Arabic ligatures either :)
PPS: Arabic is a pain in the ass frankly, to write - each letter has up to FOUR versions, depending on its position in the word (initial, medial, final, by itself) and depending on the letter, it can either connect to previous and next letter or JUST the previous, which means that the next letter has to use the INITIAL form even though it's in the middle of a word...
It takes the average student about 5 weeks to figure this out. Don't get me started on the short vowel pointing system (long vowel are indicated by consonants (!) and you just have to know from context whether something is read as a YA or a long I sound), feminine nouns using Ta Marbuta (urgh) or Tanween (diacritics used to mark adverbs).
It's an insane writing system all in all, but I love it for some reason..:)
On 28 Sep 2013, at 20:47, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
On 2013-09-28 11:45, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 28 Sep 2013, at 11:39, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:
On 2013-09-28 11:33, Sampsa Laine wrote:
If I type the document locally and upload it via Kermit, it sort of
works.
Unfortunately it doesn't keep the ligatures which makes it more or
less useless for Arabic :)
How do you verify that it "works"? What does the document look like on
the Mac? I mean, if you really look at all the bytes. What did you use
to create it?
The letters are all there, but they're not correctly connected
(ligatures) - again, probably a Terminal.app problem, VMS is storing
them just fine.
That could be a question of fixed font width. Would they look ok if you types the same file in Terminal.app but running locally on the Mac?
When 'cat'd on the Mac, it looks the same as it does on the VMS system.
The text editor I used uses a fixed width font and draws the ligatures correctly (I suppose they make the horizontal base line shorter/longer as necessary).
In this case, until I get Terminal (it's broken in iTerm too, BTW) to display the ligatures correctly, I won't even worry about using the files on VMS.*
As for Hebrew, I know the alphabet but don't know more than a dozen words of the language. So technically possible I suppose but not very useful :)
If I remember correctly, the is a DW MOTIF for HEBREW license in the hobbyist PAK, wonder what that did? Right to left writing?
* Microsoft Word on Mac didn't unbreak the ligatures until about 2008. Never heard so much Arabic swearing as when somebody on a Mac gets sent an important but impossible to read document in MS DOC format :)
On 2013-09-29 12:40, Mark Wickens wrote:
On 29/09/2013 11:32, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-09-29 00:08, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
Doh! Just checked iterm2, and it also fails on DECCOLM...
Both have their issues but then, so does xterm. I found so many
issues with
the Xorg issue of xterm that I'm now building it from source; not
that that
doesn't have issues too, it's just not as many.
If you find any, I'm all ears. At the moment I'm not aware of any
issues in xterm, but I have fixed bugs in it in the past.
Johnny
I did raise an obscure compilation issue with xterm on Digital Unix
3.2C, but to be fair, I did say that he should feel free to ignore me :)
Compilation issues are also a completely different ballpark. :-)
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
Switch it off would be my reaction if there is no phase 5 server configured .
Van: Mark Wickens
Verzonden: zondag 29 september 2013 12:39
Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Onderwerp: [HECnet] Fwd: DTSS (stuck?).
Malcolm has asked a question about DTSS which I'm not familiar with - does anyone know the answer?
Regards, Mark.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject:
DTSS (stuck?).
Date:
Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:36:34 +0000
From:
Malcolm Blunden <malcolm_blunden at hotmail.com>
To:
Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk>
Hi Mark!
Do you know anyone with experience of DTSS? On Bernd Ulmann's machine, FASOLT, DTSS$CLERK is stuck in LEF, apparently waiting for something that will never happen, and has come up like that through at least two consecutive reboots. I don't know whether he doesn't know how to fix it or hasn't noticed. I don't like to bother him because I know he is very busy, so I'd prefer to be able to offer some suggestions before raising the matter. My own experience, such as it is, is only that DTSS is a nice idea when it works but a real pain when it doesn't. If it isn't fixed before the last Sunday in October, it will cause a slight problem. Any ideas?
Regards,
Malcolm.
On 29/09/2013 11:32, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-09-29 00:08, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
Doh! Just checked iterm2, and it also fails on DECCOLM...
Both have their issues but then, so does xterm. I found so many issues with
the Xorg issue of xterm that I'm now building it from source; not that that
doesn't have issues too, it's just not as many.
If you find any, I'm all ears. At the moment I'm not aware of any issues in xterm, but I have fixed bugs in it in the past.
Johnny
I did raise an obscure compilation issue with xterm on Digital Unix 3.2C, but to be fair, I did say that he should feel free to ignore me :)
Mark.
--
http://www.wickensonline.co.ukhttp://hecnet.euhttp://declegacy.org.ukhttp://retrochallenge.nethttps://twitter.com/#!/%40urbancamo
Malcolm has asked a question about DTSS which I'm not familiar with - does anyone know the answer?
Regards, Mark.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject:
DTSS (stuck?).
Date:
Sun, 29 Sep 2013 10:36:34 +0000
From:
Malcolm Blunden <malcolm_blunden at hotmail.com>
To:
Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk>
Hi Mark!
Do you know anyone with experience of DTSS? On Bernd Ulmann's machine, FASOLT, DTSS$CLERK is stuck in LEF, apparently waiting for something that will never happen, and has come up like that through at least two consecutive reboots. I don't know whether he doesn't know how to fix it or hasn't noticed. I don't like to bother him because I know he is very busy, so I'd prefer to be able to offer some suggestions before raising the matter. My own experience, such as it is, is only that DTSS is a nice idea when it works but a real pain when it doesn't. If it isn't fixed before the last Sunday in October, it will cause a slight problem. Any ideas?
Regards,
Malcolm.
On 2013-09-29 00:08, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
Doh! Just checked iterm2, and it also fails on DECCOLM...
Both have their issues but then, so does xterm. I found so many issues with
the Xorg issue of xterm that I'm now building it from source; not that that
doesn't have issues too, it's just not as many.
If you find any, I'm all ears. At the moment I'm not aware of any issues in xterm, but I have fixed bugs in it in the past.
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
