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15589 discussions

by mcguire＠neurotica.com

LSSM hosted a CompSci class from Carnegie-Mellon University today, a for-credit class trip and project. They all learned the Forth language, rather well I might add, and wrote their own demos, on one of our PDP-11/70s. Here are some pics: http://www.neurotica.com/misc/LSSM-CMU-2021/20211115_152707.jpg http://www.neurotica.com/misc/LSSM-CMU-2021/20211115_152757.jpg http://www.neurotica.com/misc/LSSM-CMU-2021/20211115_154319_03.jpg http://www.neurotica.com/misc/LSSM-CMU-2021/20211115_154355_01.jpg http://www.neurotica.com/misc/LSSM-CMU-2021/20211115_154451.jpg The 11/70 isn't pictured, but you all know what those look like. It's the one on the Wikipedia "PDP-11" page, though that's a very old picture from when it was at my home. (please excuse the falling front window sign, it's disintegrating and we're awaiting its replacement) I mention this here in case anyone is interested, and the machine, FANG::, is on HECnet whenever it's running. (which is my tenuous link to "on-topic") -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

4 years, 2 months

ANF10 network --> Kdp/Dup

by R.Voorhorst＠swabhawat.com

L.S. It is quite easy to expand this; currently I run 8 lines from the Kdp/dup and it works quite well. It needs a slight adaptation in Simh and another in Tops10, but you have to rebuild the monitor. Reindert From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Robert Armstrong Sent: Tuesday, 16 November, 2021 17:34 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: [HECnet] ANF10 network Supratim and I (with some help and encouragement from Peter) have set up an ANF10 network between the TOPS10 nodes VENTI and TWONKY. If you haven't heard of it, ANF10 (short for "A Networking Feature" - yes, really!) predates DECnet (I'm pretty sure, although I'm sure there will be debate about that) and provides mostly the same functions - remote terminals, file transfer, etc. ANF10 also has remote RJEs with card readers, line printers and terminal concentrators. .net/anf [ANF10 network: connected to VENTI(20), located at VENTI(20), 2 nodes] Node VENTI (20) SIMH KS10 VENTI 7.04 NET 14-Nov-21 Node TWONKY (37) SIMH KS10 TWONKY 7.04NET 15-Nov-21 It's possible to run ANF10 and DECnet both, and that's what we're doing so TWONKY and VENTI are also available on HECnet. If anybody else has a TOPS10 system and would like to connect it would be nice to add a few more nodes, but there is a problem. TOPS10 supports a maximum of two KDP/DUP lines on the KS10, and you need one for DECnet and the other for ANF10. That means each system can talk to at most one other ANF10 system, which limits the network size to two nodes. Bummer. There are a few options available - * DEC made some DNxx PDP-11 boxes that supported multiple ANF10 connections. We could set up one of these as a router. * Somebody could hack TOPS10 to allow more than two DUP lines. * Somebody could write a pyDECnet type gizmo that speaks ANF10. And there might be others that I haven't thought of yet. Any ideas? Bob

4 years, 2 months

DEfining HECnet node names on TOPS-10

by bob＠jfcl.com

Johnny's FIX.T20 HECnet node list works on TOPS-10 as well (same NCP, same commands), BUT there's an issue. What you'd really like to do is to put something like "TAKE HECNET.CMD" inside of [1,4]SYSTEM.CMD. The latter is executed automatically at boot time and this would let you define all HECnet nodes when you start up. However OPR (at least the version with TOPS-10 7.04) doesn't allow nested TAKE commands, so the "TAKE HECNET." inside of SYSTEM.CMD fails. Has somebody figured out a trick to get around this? Bob

4 years, 2 months

Tops-20 Terminal Buffers?

by tommytimesharing＠gmail.com

I was doing some more Kermit-20 measurements while I continue to debug the NRT code. Again, the fastest transfer rate that I could get out of a loopback pseudo-terminal connection was 129.16 KBps with a packet size of 140 characters (note previous post was in baud) .? Since this is not going outside of the PDP-10, one assumes that it would either be the top speed possible or near it as we are just talking shuttling data between buffers. I did a transfer of the same file to an iMac and was /very/ surprised to find that I got 4,000 byte packet size and a transfer rate 151.78 KBps.? That's right, using the NI resulted in a speed _increase_ of 17%.? I instrumented Kermit to report the allocated monitor buffers by line type and got the table below from various sign ons, viz: ? TTY line Type:?? FE?? PTY? NRT? TVT? CTM ? Input Buffers:??? 1??? 1??? 1??? 1??? 1 ? Output Buffers:?? 2??? 1??? 2??? 4??? 2 The abbreviations are as follows: * ?FE, Front End (RSX-20F) terminal (there is only one, CTY) * PTY, Pseudo-terminal * NRT, DECnet Network Remote Terminal * TVT, Internet Telnet Virtual Terminal * CTM, DECnet CTERM (I forget what CTERM abbreviates to) * LAT, Local Area Terminal (I don't currently have a working transport and client for this) So what we can see is that a TVT has four _times_ the buffers to play with than the PTY.? I don't currently know how large a terminal buffer is nor what else this might mean, but it is suggestive. For what it's worth, I also did comparison with FTP.? A data transfer in the RFC959 paradigm is acknowledged on the control channel with return code of 226.? There are no acknowledgements of the data channel; it's a straight fire hose.? As I expected, an FTP transfer blew Kermit right out of the water.? For the same sized file, the 20 measured an upload data rate of 1.09 *M*Bps with a 10 microsecond resolution (from first network write to return from closing the transfer 'socket').? The iMac measured 1.25 *M*Bps download. So it would appear that an FTP transfer is about 7.38 times faster, which is of interest, but otherwise perhaps irrelevant as they are not even remotely doing the same thing.? One expects the same result for DAP, once I get FTP up on that transport.? Again, we're not comparing apples to apples.

4 years, 2 months

Multiple nodes failing NICE in the same way

by paulkoning＠comcast.net

My network scanner is getting very strange responses from three different nodes all misbehaving the same way: CAIR, MAGPIE, and FARGO. What I see is: 1. The connection to object 19 (NICE, the network management listener) is accepted, but the version number that is supposed to be sent as part of the accept is missing. 2. When I send a NICE request to the node, I get back a message with this content: <28>Nov 12 20:35:16 dnetd[1688]: Cannot chdir to /nonexistent : No such file or directory\n\xff\x00\x00 All three nodes do this. Configuration error that just happens to exist on all three? paul

4 years, 2 months

RSTS/E started emitting "?EVTLOG (BLDNIC) -- %Integer error" messages

by tony.nicholson＠computer.org

With the recent talk about the magic 9-Nov-2021 date affecting TOPS-10, I notice today that my RSTS/E V10.1 system has started putting out console messages - ?EVTLOG (BLDNIC) -- %Integer error I'm running this on my PiPDP-11 which uses the Oscar modified SIMH PDP11 11/70 emulation. It's 10-Nov-2021 in Australia! I'm running the Paul Koning's updated Y2K version of EVTLOG from https://github.com/pkoning2/decstuff/tree/master/decnete Any ideas? I've tried rebooting and the message appears after start-up has completed, and at shutdown when the date is set to 10-Nov-21 - but not when use yesterday's date 9-Nov-21 Tony -- Tony Nicholson <tony.nicholson at computer.org>

4 years, 2 months

Another TOPS-10 DECnet problem

by bob＠jfcl.com

. not date related this time (or at least I don't think it is). Every time I boot TOPS-10 (7.04, KS10, simh) I get stopcode NTMNEC. The job running is NML and the user PC is 511522. This is a debug stopcode so the system keeps going. The manual says of NTMNEC - "Some routine took the non-skip return, but did not give an error code by calling NTExxx. This means that the program returned to top level and field NXERR was zero. Determine which routine is failing, and make the error return give an error code." Has anybody else seen this? Is there a patch? It's getting a bit annoying, not to mention that it keeps crash dumping. Thanks, Bob

4 years, 2 months

Kermit-20 DECnet Implementation

by tommytimesharing＠gmail.com

I needed to have a separate transport mechanism for testing both the Tops-10 and Tops-20 FAL, NFT and DAP implementations.? I wanted to be able to compare files to make sure I hadn't messed anything up.? I also thought that a speed comparison might perhaps be of interest, but otherwise not directly useful. I've modified K20MIT to be able to transfer files both over DECnet Network Remote Terminals and pseudo-terminals.? I did the pseudo-terminal part first so I could debug the alternate line code more easily without having any DECnet issues getting in the way.? Once I'm satisfied that Kermit will transfer over a non-physical line, I can rule out any problems I have debugging the DECnet code.? In other words, I'll know that, whatever issue I bump into, it will be reasonable to assume that it is related to NRT transport and not anything Kermit is doing. Right now, a lot of sparks have come flying out because I am taking code that is nearly 40 years old that grew up dealing with with a DH11 front end line and wrenching it into using virtual terminals.? However, earlier this evening, I had my first pseudo-terminal transfer.? The file was the ASCII text for Ralph Gorin's "Introduction to Assembler Language Programming" book. This is about 1.5 megabytes long and takes up 621 pages on disk, which I imagined would be a 'reasonable' size.?? Kermit says it clocked about 815 Kbps doing the transfer, but I really wouldn't have any idea what that number means.? A FILCOM shows that the files match to the byte, which is the important part.? Details below. ??? ?T ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Kermit-20>*connect* [KERMIT-20: Loopback connection to VENTI2:: via PTY7: using TTY22:, type <CTRL-\>C to return.] Kermit-20>*set delay 15* Kermit-20>*server* Kermit Server running on DEC-20 host. Please type your escape sequence to return to your local machine. Shut down the server by typing the BYE command to KERMIT on your local machine. [KERMIT-20: Returning to local system, VENTI2::] Kermit-20>*show line* TTY for file transfer: 22 (assigned TTY line, KERMIT-20 is _LOCAL_) Handshake: None Flow-Control: XON-XOFF Parity: None Duplex: Full Speed: (Unknown) Break Simulation: Disabled TVT Binary: On TVT Negotiate: Automatic Log: (none) Kermit-20>*cwd ps:<slogin>* [Connected to TOMMYT:<SLOGIN>] Kermit-20>*send doc:tops20_ASSEMBLER_PROGRAMMING.TXT.1 (as) * Kermit-20>*statistics* Maximum number of characters in packet: 80 received; 80 sent Number of characters transmitted in 19 seconds Sent: 1711619 Overhead: 124378 Received: 138712 Overhead: 138712 Total: 1850331 Overhead: 263090 Total characters transmitted per second: 97385 Effective data rate: _835390_ bps ILDB: 0 SIN: 0 SIN Max: 0 BIN: 138712 Interpacket pause in effect: 0 sec Timeouts: 0 NAKs: 0 Kermit-20>*push* [KERMIT-20: PUSHing to new EXEC.] [POP from Exec to return.] @*vdir /since today* TOMMYT:<SLOGIN> TOPS20_ASSEMBLER_PROGRAMMING.TXT.1;P774200 621 1587241(7) 13-Nov-2021 17:29:35 SLOGIN Total of 621 pages in 1 file @*defINE f1: (AS) doc:tops20_ASSEMBLER_PROGRAMMING.TXT.0 * @*defINE f2: (AS) h:tops20_aSSEMBLER_PROGRAMMING.TXT.0* @*filcom* **tty:=f1:,f2:* _No differences encountered_ **^Z* @

4 years, 2 months

Tops-20 Anonymous FAL

by tommytimesharing＠gmail.com

As shipped, the Tops-20 FAL does not implement the idea of a default account.? So you can't use it unless you have something valid to type into the user and password fields.? I changed all that and the candidate implementation has been up on VENTI2:: for a few days to allow Bob to pull some Kermit-10 sources that I got from the Kermit project. This is tested code, yet something between maybe an alpha and beta version with debugging hooks, Etc. I noted that some have people used it, which I think is *great!* If you bump into any problems or thing something doesn't work right, please drop me a note.? Recall that Tops-20 DAP does not implement RENAME (which I don't allow in anonymous, anyway) If you want the Kermit-10 sources, then you want to use the K10MIT: system logical, viz: VENTI2::K10MIT:*.* will show you the goodies.

4 years, 2 months

DECnet/Python

by fsword007＠gmail.com

Folks, I successfully installed DECnet/Python on Ubuntu 21.10 system and was successfully connected to HECnet. I have a few questions about DECnet/Python. I choose that because it support virtual circuits like Multinet over TCP, etc.. I can't find any apps (programs) to support DECnet/Python like login, set host, dir, etc. Only DECnet for Linux has programs. Does DECnet for Raspberry Pi work with Ubuntu 21.10 (Linux 5.13 for x86)? Tim

4 years, 2 months

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