I understand BQT's point about keeping the signal/noise ratio good on the main technical HECnet list, but sometimes random conversations start etc. For these cases I created hecnetrandom at googlegroups.com, open to anyone (if spam becomes an issue I'll tighten the security a tad)
This is NOT a replacement for this awesome mailing list that I have enjoyed and learnt many thing from over nearly a decade. I just feel that there is a community spirit in HECnet that would probably be best expressed on another mailing list.
The address for the group is hecnetrandom at googlegroups.com , just send any mail and you will be subscribed to it.
I think this will lower the random noise in the main HECnet list yet could be amusing for the people who enjoy the social aspect of retrocomputing / networking..
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 10/02/2013 07:14 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Good to hear that! Something I've been considering for a while is that
if they were to join, should we invite their whole userbase to the
HECnet mailing list or possibly just the EISNER adminds?
Uh? God no! I think anyone who are interested should subscribe themself
anyway, and let the rest be.
Johnny does NOT like email traffic. ;)
I like to keep HECnet somewhat low volume, on topic, technical, yadda
yadda. I don't want it to be a general forum for people to vent their
hot air.
If the list grows larger, I will have to start policing more.
Can't blame you there. It's just human nature, though, for a group
with such "vertical" common interests and yet varied backgrounds to
become very social and friendly. It would've been great if those types
of threads had migrated to the dectec list, but that didn't happen...not
sure why.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 2013-10-02 23:58, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 2 Oct 2013, at 23:50, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
Good to hear that! Something I've been considering for a while is that if they were to join, should we invite their whole userbase to the HECnet mailing list or possibly just the EISNER adminds?
Uh? God no! I think anyone who are interested should subscribe themself anyway, and let the rest be.
I wasn't suggesting that at all, in fact the next paragraph states the opposite quite clearly.
Yes, but even the suggestion... :-)
I personally think the admins would make a better choice, there are lists like DECTEK for general DEChead stuff.
I think that should be entirely up to them.
You could perhaps create a notes group for HECnet on EISNER?
As for admins being on the mailing list, this could be useful but of course mandatory.
Same as for being on HECnet in general. I'm not sure all people who have nodes on HECnet are even on the list. And lots of people are on the list without having any nodes.
Brian, if we get this going, how do I create a new NOTES group?
(I'm a total NOTES n00b)
Should be easy. I've not properly used NOTES in about 25 years, but running it on a TTY, there should be help enough. And I would expect the web interface to have some easy click and shoot thingys. Just look around.
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 2013-10-02 23:57, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 05:50 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Good to hear that! Something I've been considering for a while is that
if they were to join, should we invite their whole userbase to the
HECnet mailing list or possibly just the EISNER adminds?
Uh? God no! I think anyone who are interested should subscribe themself
anyway, and let the rest be.
Johnny does NOT like email traffic. ;)
I like to keep HECnet somewhat low volume, on topic, technical, yadda yadda. I don't want it to be a general forum for people to vent their hot air.
If the list grows larger, I will have to start policing more.
I personally think the admins would make a better choice, there are
lists like DECTEK for general DEChead stuff.
I think that should be entirely up to them.
You could perhaps create a notes group for HECnet on EISNER?
That's a good idea.
Yes, I think it is... :-)
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, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:54 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Yet I have a drive that shows up as /7/ different 1.05G disks. With a
different device number assigned to each. Along with my 2G drive
showing up as 600M
That can happen if the drive is set to the same SCSI ID as the
initiator (controller).
Changed the initiator ID to 7. Booting now. From here I will get
TCP/IP running if I can, and then ftp the VMS .IMG over and write it to
the Quantum disk (hopefully). From there I will boot from the quantum
disk and do an isntall on to the 4G disk turning the Quantum drive in to
user directories.
Sounds good. Good luck.
Thanks!
Will I want to write the image directly to the Quantum disk, or mount
the image and copy the files off?
Write it directly.
-Dave
Backup can do that right? I don't have to right disk images to disk in VMS too often. ;)
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 10/02/2013 06:55 PM, Sampsa Laine wrote:
There is MicroEMACS, which is really easy to port around (I have it
running on RSX).
I used MicroEMACS when I did a lot of DOS development in the 1980s. I
also ran it for awhile (until I got GNU Emacs built) on a 3B1.
I remember running MicroEMACS on my Amiga 500! Awesome editor :)
It really is. Now THAT will build on most anything. ;)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 10/02/2013 06:54 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Yet I have a drive that shows up as /7/ different 1.05G disks. With a
different device number assigned to each. Along with my 2G drive
showing up as 600M
That can happen if the drive is set to the same SCSI ID as the
initiator (controller).
Changed the initiator ID to 7. Booting now. From here I will get
TCP/IP running if I can, and then ftp the VMS .IMG over and write it to
the Quantum disk (hopefully). From there I will boot from the quantum
disk and do an isntall on to the 4G disk turning the Quantum drive in to
user directories.
Sounds good. Good luck.
Thanks!
Will I want to write the image directly to the Quantum disk, or mount
the image and copy the files off?
Write it directly.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 3 Oct 2013, at 00:44, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:09 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
There is MicroEMACS, which is really easy to port around (I have it
running on RSX).
I used MicroEMACS when I did a lot of DOS development in the 1980s. I
also ran it for awhile (until I got GNU Emacs built) on a 3B1.
I remember running MicroEMACS on my Amiga 500! Awesome editor :)
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:50 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Yet I have a drive that shows up as /7/ different 1.05G disks. With a
different device number assigned to each. Along with my 2G drive
showing up as 600M
That can happen if the drive is set to the same SCSI ID as the
initiator (controller).
Changed the initiator ID to 7. Booting now. From here I will get
TCP/IP running if I can, and then ftp the VMS .IMG over and write it to
the Quantum disk (hopefully). From there I will boot from the quantum
disk and do an isntall on to the 4G disk turning the Quantum drive in to
user directories.
Sounds good. Good luck.
-Dave
Thanks!
Will I want to write the image directly to the Quantum disk, or mount the image and copy the files off?
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 10/02/2013 06:50 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Yet I have a drive that shows up as /7/ different 1.05G disks. With a
different device number assigned to each. Along with my 2G drive
showing up as 600M
That can happen if the drive is set to the same SCSI ID as the
initiator (controller).
Changed the initiator ID to 7. Booting now. From here I will get
TCP/IP running if I can, and then ftp the VMS .IMG over and write it to
the Quantum disk (hopefully). From there I will boot from the quantum
disk and do an isntall on to the 4G disk turning the Quantum drive in to
user directories.
Sounds good. Good luck.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:37 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Yet I have a drive that shows up as /7/ different 1.05G disks. With a
different device number assigned to each. Along with my 2G drive
showing up as 600M
That can happen if the drive is set to the same SCSI ID as the
initiator (controller).
-Dave
Changed the initiator ID to 7. Booting now. From here I will get TCP/IP running if I can, and then ftp the VMS .IMG over and write it to the Quantum disk (hopefully). From there I will boot from the quantum disk and do an isntall on to the 4G disk turning the Quantum drive in to user directories.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-10-03 00:31, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:05 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Otherwise, if you have a spare SCSI disk, you could dump the
installation
image onto it (e.g. with dd) and use it as if it were a CD-ROM.
I hae a spare SCSI disk...but no way to write the image to scsi disk
other than VMS. The current VMS install albeit touchy would work for
that.
You don't have a random Linux box there with a SCSI interface?
What about the Netra T1-105? That'd do it.
It doesn't have the correct SCSI interface...I don't have any adapters
to toss in SCA drives.
Ahh, screwed by The Connector Conspiracy. :-(
-Dave
Yup. Same damn protocol, different interfaces.
That is what adapters are made for...
Johnny
Adapters only help if you have 'em. ;)
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 10/02/2013 06:09 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
There is MicroEMACS, which is really easy to port around (I have it
running on RSX).
I used MicroEMACS when I did a lot of DOS development in the 1980s. I
also ran it for awhile (until I got GNU Emacs built) on a 3B1.
Then I ran across an amazingly nice emacs implementation called
"Freemacs". It's DOS-only, written in assembler, but like GNU Emacs, it
is just an editor core plus primitives, with higher-level functions
written in an interpreted language. Freemacs' language is called
"Mint", and it's sorta Lisp-like, but not really Lisp. (one could say
that GNU Emacs' elisp isn't really Lisp either, but..)
If you do anything DOS-related at all, and are an emacs person, I
recommend Freemacs wholeheartedly. It really is very, very nice.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 2013-10-03 00:31, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:05 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Otherwise, if you have a spare SCSI disk, you could dump the
installation
image onto it (e.g. with dd) and use it as if it were a CD-ROM.
I hae a spare SCSI disk...but no way to write the image to scsi disk
other than VMS. The current VMS install albeit touchy would work for
that.
You don't have a random Linux box there with a SCSI interface?
What about the Netra T1-105? That'd do it.
It doesn't have the correct SCSI interface...I don't have any adapters
to toss in SCA drives.
Ahh, screwed by The Connector Conspiracy. :-(
-Dave
Yup. Same damn protocol, different interfaces.
That is what adapters are made for...
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 10/02/2013 06:37 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Yet I have a drive that shows up as /7/ different 1.05G disks. With a
different device number assigned to each. Along with my 2G drive
showing up as 600M
That can happen if the drive is set to the same SCSI ID as the
initiator (controller).
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
yOn Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:05 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Otherwise, if you have a spare SCSI disk, you could dump the
installation
image onto it (e.g. with dd) and use it as if it were a CD-ROM.
I hae a spare SCSI disk...but no way to write the image to scsi disk
other than VMS. The current VMS install albeit touchy would work for
that.
You don't have a random Linux box there with a SCSI interface?
What about the Netra T1-105? That'd do it.
It doesn't have the correct SCSI interface...I don't have any adapters
to toss in SCA drives.
Ahh, screwed by The Connector Conspiracy. :-(
-Dave
Yup. Same damn protocol, different interfaces.
Yet I have a drive that shows up as /7/ different 1.05G disks. With a different device number assigned to each. Along with my 2G drive showing up as 600M
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 06:05 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Otherwise, if you have a spare SCSI disk, you could dump the
installation
image onto it (e.g. with dd) and use it as if it were a CD-ROM.
I hae a spare SCSI disk...but no way to write the image to scsi disk
other than VMS. The current VMS install albeit touchy would work for
that.
You don't have a random Linux box there with a SCSI interface?
What about the Netra T1-105? That'd do it.
It doesn't have the correct SCSI interface...I don't have any adapters
to toss in SCA drives.
Ahh, screwed by The Connector Conspiracy. :-(
-Dave
Yup. Same damn protocol, different interfaces.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 2013-10-03 00:09, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-10-02 23:29, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> writes:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Depends...
Issue a "SHOW DEVICE" at the dead sargent and post the output.
Well...this could explain a bit: I was burning at 24x and throwing
those
discs at a 12x drive.
:rolleyes:
That generally has no correlation whatsoever. What's important is
whether
or not the CD-rom can read the recordable media you're using. Some
record-
able media works better than other in older CD-rom drives.
Hey, I haven't touched CD-ROM stuff in awhile! ;)
You need a refresher...
BTW, the drive you have installed, is it jumpered for 512 byte
blocks???
I'm not even seeing a jumper for it on the drive. Drive is a crippled
Apple CR-507-C (Hey! It's the only working SCSI CD-ROM drive I have!)
I wouldn't be surprised if your problem turns out to be related to the
block size. DEC machines wants disks (including CD) to have 512 byte
blocks. A majority of CD drives do 2048 byte blocks. Not compatible.
Johnny
I think I have several 512-byte sector drives! None of them SCSI...
The drive burning the images is 2048-byte...that'd explain the problem.
No. The writing is fine. You can write the data on any drive...
You need to read it on a drive that do 512 byte blocks.
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 Oct 2, 2013, at 3:09 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
I think I have several 512-byte sector drives! None of them SCSI...
The drive burning the images is 2048-byte...that'd explain the problem.
I don't think this is a problem. I've burned many VMS images on my Mac and booted my VAXen from them.
Ian
On 10/02/2013 06:05 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Otherwise, if you have a spare SCSI disk, you could dump the
installation
image onto it (e.g. with dd) and use it as if it were a CD-ROM.
I hae a spare SCSI disk...but no way to write the image to scsi disk
other than VMS. The current VMS install albeit touchy would work for
that.
You don't have a random Linux box there with a SCSI interface?
What about the Netra T1-105? That'd do it.
It doesn't have the correct SCSI interface...I don't have any adapters
to toss in SCA drives.
Ahh, screwed by The Connector Conspiracy. :-(
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-10-02 23:29, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> writes:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Depends...
Issue a "SHOW DEVICE" at the dead sargent and post the output.
Well...this could explain a bit: I was burning at 24x and throwing those
discs at a 12x drive.
:rolleyes:
That generally has no correlation whatsoever. What's important is
whether
or not the CD-rom can read the recordable media you're using. Some
record-
able media works better than other in older CD-rom drives.
Hey, I haven't touched CD-ROM stuff in awhile! ;)
You need a refresher...
BTW, the drive you have installed, is it jumpered for 512 byte blocks???
I'm not even seeing a jumper for it on the drive. Drive is a crippled
Apple CR-507-C (Hey! It's the only working SCSI CD-ROM drive I have!)
I wouldn't be surprised if your problem turns out to be related to the block size. DEC machines wants disks (including CD) to have 512 byte blocks. A majority of CD drives do 2048 byte blocks. Not compatible.
Johnny
I think I have several 512-byte sector drives! None of them SCSI...
The drive burning the images is 2048-byte...that'd explain the problem.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On 2013-10-02 23:59, Clem Cole wrote:
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com
<mailto:mcguire at neurotica.com>> wrote:
Emacs builds on most everything, and is packaged for most (all?) Linux
distributions.
Dave -- might want to tighten comment that a little. GNU-emacs builds
on most anything with a 32 bit linear address space or greater. Other
emacs implementations YMMV.
In addition, a port of Emacs is actually not that trivial.
Anyone familiar with TOPS-20 (or OS/8, or probably some other of DEC OSes) will probably recognize what I'm going to write next.
Emacs "knows" how an executable looks like, and how the memory layout is of the running program, and how dynamic libraries work, and so on. Because, as a part of building emacs, emacs will start bare bone, read in all kind of initial lisp packages, compile stuff, and create a finalized emacs in memory that is running with all the bit and pieces of initialization code already run. At that point, emacs will do a memory dump to disk, and munge that file to be an executable. And that is the actual emacs binary.
For any new system, and especially for any new binary image format, emacs needs to be taught all about it.
But anyway, if the scope would be "emacs" and not "GNU emacs", then implementations exists for just about everything. I've written a small emacs-clone in TECO-8, there exists multiple Emacs clones for MS-DOS (maybe the best known is Epsilon). Stacken (the computer club at the Royal Institute of Technology) wrote an emacs clone called AMIS, which ran on VMS way back, as well as on Tops-10, RSTS/E, Norsk Data machines, and god knows what else.
There is MicroEMACS, which is really easy to port around (I have it running on RSX).
2BSD have JOVE.
I'm sure people can easily come up with other implementations...
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 Oct 2, 2013, at 3:00 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
I wouldn't be surprised if your problem turns out to be related to the block size. DEC machines wants disks (including CD) to have 512 byte blocks. A majority of CD drives do 2048 byte blocks. Not compatible.
If it doesn't have a physical sector-size jumper, it won't work. I've never met a compatible drive that didn't have the jumper. By the way, this is the same type of drive needed for an old Sun Sparcstation, if you have one of those lying around...
Ian
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/02/2013 05:56 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Otherwise, if you have a spare SCSI disk, you could dump the installation
image onto it (e.g. with dd) and use it as if it were a CD-ROM.
I hae a spare SCSI disk...but no way to write the image to scsi disk
other than VMS. The current VMS install albeit touchy would work for that.
You don't have a random Linux box there with a SCSI interface?
What about the Netra T1-105? That'd do it.
-Dave
It doesn't have the correct SCSI interface...I don't have any adapters to toss in SCA drives.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-10-02 23:08, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Depends...
Issue a "SHOW DEVICE" at the dead sargent and post the output.
Well...this could explain a bit: I was burning at 24x and throwing those
discs at a 12x drive.
Eh... And... The speed you write with have no relation to the data eventually ending up on the CD, nor the speed you read them off. The speed relates to the time it will take to read/write the disk...
Johnny
Ahh. I assumed it was something related to timing.
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
