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15595 discussions

PDP-10s, was Re: [HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-02-12 07:17, G. wrote: On Tue, 12 Feb 2013 01:47:06 +0100, you wrote: What did you plan to run? Is DECnet even possible if you run TOPS-20? I seem to remember MRC mumbling at one time about him having hacked that, but I'm not sure if it ever became officially supported or distributed. Tops-10 might work with DECnet, but then I also wonder over which interface, and if it do Phase IV...? Both TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 have DECnet Phase IV in newer releases, but, if I'm not wrong, Ethernet support at large is a KL10 thing only, so the only KS10 option for DECnet would be DDCMP, but it should anyway run Phase IV (as long as there is enough memory, so maybe better stick to end node only). There is a problem with software: if I'm not wrong (again!), TOPS-20 on KS10 is limited to V4.1 (due to memory contraints?), instead I think that the same CPU would run TOPS-10 up to the final V7.x releases. Note that probably (?) TOPS-20 V4.1 had only Phase III, so Phase IV on 2020 seems to be available only with TOPS-10 and DDCMP. HTH, :) G. Right. This is somewhat what I seem to remember, which is why I asked... 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

13 years, 1 month

BTW, Peter..

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-02-12 06:29, Dave McGuire wrote: On 02/12/2013 05:56 AM, Peter Lothberg wrote: "They're using sophisticated technology to degrade service, which probably costs them a lot of money. It would be better to see them use that money to improve service" So why is anyone (Dave) buying their service? I'm buying their service because it's the best service I can get here. (and it's significantly better than the best I could get in either Florida or DC, at least when I lived there) And it's cheaper by about 30% than what I had in Florida, though that was not a consideration, as my connectivity is my livelihood. As a bonus, for that 30% discount, I have more than twice the bandwidth and far, far better reliability. (I was on Sprint business class in Florida) I am 100% happy with Comcast Business. They are a class act. (with the exception of that routing hole, which I will investigate!) Please keep in mind that this is NOT the same organization, business model, or staff as the consumer-grade shared cable network service. (There's fiber to the pole outside my building!) You guys are funny... You totally missed Peters point. It is *Comcast* who do not have access to the whole internet, not the other way around. Comcast can't do anything about it. Comcast is blacklisted by some parts of the Internet. If you want access to those parts of the Internet you need to switch to another ISP, which actually do have access to all of it. Comcast is not blocking something for you. Comcast do not have access, and thus can't sell it either. Comcast probably did not tell you, or any other customer, that you will only be able to access parts of the Internet through them. Ask for a refund, or go somewhere else...? I doubt Comcast will suddenly be able to speak to Stupi.SE within any forseeable future. 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

13 years, 1 month

PDP-11 arch & OS ownership, was Re: [HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by bqt＠softjar.se

On 2013-02-12 06:15, John Wilson wrote: From: Brett Bump <bbump at rsts.org> Domain Name:XX2247.ORG Registrant Name:John Wilson Registrant Organization:XX2247 Ah, ha ha ha ha! Ok, John fess up. What is the real scoop? ;-) Actually unrelated! I set that up ages ago for a documentation project that I'm, um, still getting around to. Other than the obvious name, it's nothing to do with the XX2247 which may or may not own the PDP-11 software. (And thanks Dave McGuire for the key in the blurry picture!) Oh, XX2247 LLC do own the software, even if HP still have control over things. :-( The worst disservice DEC ever did to the PDP-11 community... 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

13 years, 1 month

Mulita issue

by hvlems＠zonnet.nl

Dan, for my Multia I use a 543 MB Toshiba disk. On its label it says: disk drive MK1924FBV HDD2524 L ZE91 Hans -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] Namens Dan B Verzonden: dinsdag, februari 2013 9:50 Aan: hecnet at update.uu.se Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue great, good to know info On 2/12/13, hvlems at zonnet.nl <hvlems at zonnet.nl> wrote: Dan, when I'm back home I'll mail you the Toshiba part number(s). Hans -----Original Message----- From: Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:13:52 To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue no, the server one is the same of the miata and the noname, (and probably the rs6000 ibm as well) the multia ises a funny ribbon cable like the laptops and the macs, hopefully a laptop drive may work ? the toshiba are ide or scsi ? i found out those multia can use both (bummer,) but i doubt the ide may work for vms, on the miata (that "came from the factory" with an ide cd,) i had to use an external scsi for vms, would not see the original one, but would work just fine with true64 and win2000, ... maybe because it was born as an "au" for unix, mistery ;-) On 2/12/13, hvlems at zonnet.nl <hvlems at zonnet.nl> wrote: What kind of floppy drive does the Multia have? Is it similar to what is used in, say, an AlphaServer 1200? -----Original Message----- From: Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 23:51:11 To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue I think I'll just take that drive out, whatever it is, it may help cooling. I'm more worried about a replacement floppy to be honest, I like to have spare parts for everything, since finding them may be a nightmare at times. On 2/11/13, Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: @hvlems at zonnet.nl - Did you write IDE disk for a Multia? ISTR it used a 2.5" scsi drive. I thought it was, LOL, is a half size 2", guess I guessed wrong, the flat cable gave me the impression. I never did anything with that drive except using the NT 3.51 that was on it originally (upgraded later to 4.0,) I have better read the documentation before I try to "fix" it LOL. I think NT should run on SCSI, I had a WIN2000 beta running on the miata a very long time ago, but the disk went bad, and don't know where to find a CD for it. In the mid ni8neties we ran a lot of NT 3.51 and 4 on alpha, but honestly, don't remember the hardware, has been a long time (for a senile guy like me.) On 2/11/13, Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: I think I'll take the ide out, after imoaging it (hopefully,) would you know of a way of using a 2.88 non dec floppy in there ? adapters from the flat cable to the generic floppy one ? I'm wandering if I can use a regular alpha one or an ibm rs6000 one, have a few spares, just don't know if vms and the firmware may support it. On 2/11/13, Kari Uusim ki <uusimaki at exdecfinland.org> wrote: There were several options; a 2,5" SCSI disk, a 3,5" SCSI disk and a 2,5" IDE disk. What I've found out with my Multias is that it is not recommended to use an internal drive at all, because of the additional heat it produces. The enclosure is not very well designed for sufficient cooling and therefore it is best to try to minimize the heat load in every possible way. An external SCSI disk or enclosure with disks (such as a BA353) works fine. Kari On 11.2.2013 10:20, hvlems at zonnet.nl wrote: Did you write IDE disk for a Multia? ISTR it used a 2.5" scsi drive. -----Original Message----- From: Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:03:10 To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue also, for the drive, let the machine off but plugged into a socket for 24 hours, maybe needs to energize, I notice today with the multia, and before with the vax, that they need enough charge on the batteries to function anyhow, that's how the isa corrupted message went off after a while, so that issue is solved, not so for the ide hard disk, that one i think is fried, still keeps appearing and disappearing On 2/10/13, Dan B <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: I have been using barracuda plain scsi-1, external, they are small but run decent for everything (probably except windoze, never tried to run it on scsi on alpha.) All three were barracuda, I lost one machine (the miata, without counting a number of VAX, those have been dying faster, I'm down to "one" now,) but not the drives. The noise points to a bad drive, (hopefully not controller,) on linux boxes, pc and pc server hardware, I have had a lot of disk failures, sparc, sgi, hp9000 and ibm 6000 are built way better, hardly never fail, consider that those alpha (and the small drives they came with,) are now going to be 20 year old in a few months, the VAX is heading for thirty, in so I expect those old drives to fail sooner or later, I used to buy them by the lot, and still have boxes of small ones. I'm more worried when the machines fail, those are hard to replace, and parts may be really hard to find (like a multia floppy or internal ide.) Probably is time to image all those drives, and if worse comes to worse, run on stromasys or simh for the vax. cheers, daniel ;-) On 2/10/13, Michael Holmes <mholmes10 at hotmail.com> wrote: Found the hidden culprit.... The hard drive started making noises that I normally hear from a blender. The multia booted fine when I set it to mop boot without any local disk (slow but worked). So next weekend I'll remove (or replace )the drive and do the fan upgrade everyone recommends. Anyone know of any possible replacement scsi drives for multia's??? Mike Sent from my iPhone On Feb 10, 2013, at 8:39 PM, "Dan B" <dibi58 at gmail.com> wrote: keep it in a cold place, the number one cause of death for multia is processor overheating, it does not suffer cold, but fries processors in the heat On 2/10/13, Michael Holmes <mholmes10 at hotmail.com> wrote: Oh gee what a picky machine.... It wasn't lighting up the flat panel monitor from SRM console. Switched it to the same old CRT monitor I use with the DEC 3000 (only monitor with RGB inputs) and its displaying... Damn thing is ACTUALLY booting off its little disk that I installed vms on directly via the DEC 3000. Now just have to convo boot the damn thing to fix its HOME server for system disks (node name and addresses changed when I connected to HECnet). wish me luck... Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:42:08 +0200 From: uusimaki at exdecfinland.org To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: Re: [HECnet] Mulita issue Are you sure that nothing has changed on your setup since you booted the Multia successfully? Any parameter? Anything of the HW? On 10.2.2013 21:01, Michael Holmes wrote: Yes I hooked up the vms install CDROM to the multia to boot and used the boot procedure with floppy and it pretty much stalls after the "starting bootstrap ..."message. took the HD from the dec3000 with the image of the vms install disk and tried to boot from it with same results. Bought a new (and expensive) floppy for it and same results. Can flip to ARC and SRM consoles ok (not tried to boot under arc as I don't have win nt.) --------- Just booted back up and it was at ARC console so I switched it over to SRM and power cycled it and now it's not powering the monitor. Will have to find my serial cable and try to switch it. Sent from my iPhone On Feb 10, 2013, at 4:06 AM, "Kari Uusim ki" <uusimaki at exdecfinland.org> wrote: Do you have any chance to test booting from a directly connected SCSI CD-ROM or a disk? Kari On 10.2.2013 0:58, Michael Holmes wrote: Forgive me if this is off topic, but I was reading about the fixes to the VAXStation 4000 regarding chips. I bought a multia several years back and I think it sucommed to being moved to and from Germany and the States too many times. I had it booting as a satelite off a DEC 3000 just fine, until this last move. I thought the battery had died and replaced it. (dead battery prevents the bios from coming up) I get the SRM console and i'd get MOP load message on the DEC 3000 but the MULTIA just hangs after message about bootstrapping. I heard something about an I/O chip that can go bad on the MB and was wondering if anyone had any ideas that could be used to fix the MULTIA. thanks Mike

13 years, 1 month

NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by clemc＠ccc.com

Yup the 11/60 had WCS, although few customers used it. CMU/3 Rivers had created the 40e with a WCS, and wrote a call/return instruction for C. We had a hacked UNIX to use it. When I was at Tek, Steve Glaser and I toyed with trying to write the uCode for the 60 to do the same thing to try to buy some more performance (it was the first UNIX box at Tek and quickly got overloaded), but we never did - as we replaced it with an 11/70. The 60 also was known for the confuse uCode instructions and since the front panel was run by the uCode the only solution was the pull the power to halt it. Clem On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 12:44 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote: On Feb 12, 2013, at 12:38 PM, Clem Cole wrote: On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:47 AM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com<mailto:Paul_Koning at dell.com>> wrote: Nothing. It was one of the most spectacular failures in DEC history. A whole new OS (well, based on RSX I believe) and new hardware designed specifically for it (VT62), canceled a week after it was first announced. Interesting, I always though the 11/60 held that honor. Hm... All I know about the 11/60 is that there were a few of them around the building I worked. One of them was used by WPS-8 development (running RSTS) -- because the 11/60 was the fastest PDP-8 ever built thanks to custom microcode that implemented PDP-8 emulation. paul

13 years, 1 month

NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by Paul_Koning＠Dell.com

On Feb 12, 2013, at 12:38 PM, Clem Cole wrote: On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:47 AM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com<mailto:Paul_Koning at dell.com>> wrote: Nothing. It was one of the most spectacular failures in DEC history. A whole new OS (well, based on RSX I believe) and new hardware designed specifically for it (VT62), canceled a week after it was first announced. Interesting, I always though the 11/60 held that honor. Hm... All I know about the 11/60 is that there were a few of them around the building I worked. One of them was used by WPS-8 development (running RSTS) -- because the 11/60 was the fastest PDP-8 ever built thanks to custom microcode that implemented PDP-8 emulation. paul

13 years, 1 month

NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by ian＠platinum.net

On 2013-02-12, at 8:47 AM, <Paul_Koning at Dell.com> wrote: The only other DEC product that comes close is the DESNC, though that took much longer -- canceled after a year or so, as I recall, having sold a total of 4 units over that time span. (For those who don't recognize the model code: that's a 2 port 10 Mb/s Ethernet bridge that could encrypt the traffic. Among other problems, it only ran at about 4 Mb/s.) Only 4 sold? Looks like you can get one on Ebay for $350 - or even make an offer :) http://www.ebay.com/itm/DEC-DESNC-BA-LAN-ENCRYPT-DEV-W-ETH-/200267270387 Ian

13 years, 1 month

NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by clemc＠ccc.com

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:47 AM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote: Nothing. It was one of the most spectacular failures in DEC history. A whole new OS (well, based on RSX I believe) and new hardware designed specifically for it (VT62), canceled a week after it was first announced. Interesting, I always though the 11/60 held that honor.

13 years, 1 month

NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by Paul_Koning＠Dell.com

On Feb 11, 2013, at 7:21 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: ... Speaking of IAS, it really looks cool when reading specs, but I've never touched it, and another aspect of those specs is that it looks like it would be rather slow... IAS was basically RSX11-D with a timesharing system layered over it. My exposure to it was in supporting Typeset-11, which originally ran on RSX11-D and in later versions moved to IAS. For our purposes, the two were identical; we did not use the timesharing facilities of IAS at all. I'm not sure why Typeset-11 used RSX11-D instead of -M as most of the competition did. Perhaps history -- it may be that it predated -M. And yes, it was pretty heavy. It did work well enough for what we wanted, but it did use a whole 11/70 to support an application that was less functional than what competitors did with an 11/45. For example, Typeset-11 did not have WYSIWIG editing while the other guys did, and that was a major black mark. Never seen TRAX in real life either, btw. What was so good about it? Nothing. It was one of the most spectacular failures in DEC history. A whole new OS (well, based on RSX I believe) and new hardware designed specifically for it (VT62), canceled a week after it was first announced. The only other DEC product that comes close is the DESNC, though that took much longer -- canceled after a year or so, as I recall, having sold a total of 4 units over that time span. (For those who don't recognize the model code: that's a 2 port 10 Mb/s Ethernet bridge that could encrypt the traffic. Among other problems, it only ran at about 4 Mb/s.) paul

13 years, 1 month

NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

by lee.gleason＠comcast.net

>Speaking of IAS, it really looks cool when reading specs, but I've never >touched it, and another aspect of those specs is that it looks like it >would be rather slow... I managed an IAS system on an 11/70 back in the day. I don't have any formal benchmarks, but it didn't "feel" any slower than equivalent RSX11M and M+ systems I have been on. IAS was a real treat. If you wanted them, you could SYSGEN in real timesharing features for supporting users who didn't require realtime response to their needs. It included lots of concepts that later made their way into VMS, (although, considering this crowd, I don't know if that will be considered a plus here...). The most interesting feature for me was the way device drivers worked. Called "handlers", they were complete tasks, instead of the APR and a couple registers' worth of context provided by RSX11M/M+ drivers. You could do a lot more work in them, a lot easier than on the other RSX variants. The down side is that any driver action involved scheduling a task rather than the lightweight context switch required by a driver. But, having said that, the system I managed supported lots and lots of terminals at 9600 baud, and wasn't bogged down by servicing interrupts, so scheduling a task to do IO didn't turn out as bad as you'd think it would. I managed RSTS sytstems as well and I vastly preferred the richer environment provide by IAS. I recall being at the DECUS Symposium where the future of IAS was announced (that is, no future...). There was much lamentation, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over that. Support did actually continue for quite a few years after that though - turns out that the US Air Force was a big IAS user, and DEC didn't want to upset the government. BTW, I'm always looking for IAS related "stuff" - copies of the DeVIAS newsletter, IAS software (espcially DECnet-IAS) and the like. >Never seen TRAX in real life either, btw. What was so good about it? Me neither, though I did use some of the VT61 and VT62 terminals that were developed for it - like VT-52s, but with IBM style block mode. Not a lot of software outside of TRAX used their block mode features, so they were pretty rare. 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

13 years, 1 month

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