On 23 Oct 2012, at 18:23, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 10/23/2012 01:46 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Also, it's probably better I mention connecting here so all the crazy
solutions get mentioned. Dynamic IP, located in Ohio, US. I have
several spare UNIX systems to run a bridge on, and I would prefer to
get several systems connected (what area should I use? I'll get back
with node names once I figure out how to change them in RSTS/E and
TOPS-20) I'm not very good with using emacs, maybe I should just
stick with a more basic editor. Or find a better terminal emulator I
don't have any real DEC terminals or any real DEC hardware yet.
Where in Ohio? I'm in western PA, just a hair northeast of Pittsburgh.
Near Columbus.
Ahh ok, so 3-3.5hrs out. Not too bad.
I can hook you up with some hardware. I have, erm, a bit of a surplus
at the moment.
What do you have as surplus?
Good heavens, that's a loaded question. ;)
On-topic, if you're hurting for VAXen, I can free up a 4000-series machine.
Mmm, I think i'd do better here than finding a VAX on ebay, which 4000-series model in particular? Also do you happen to have drives for one? All I have spare are some 16G 5.25" SCA SCSI drives + adapters for fast SCSI. Also, if you happen to have any adapters for MMJ as I don't have any real terminals, that'd be nice, too.
Depending on which model, that'd be better than the VAXservers/VAXstations I've found.
Off toppic, and off the top of my head, probably a dozen racks' worth of comparatively recent Sun hardware. And Crays. These would involve some serious swappage, though.
Have any pentium-era systems? I need something to run Slackware 4.0 on for openlook. (You have no idea how hard it is to get this working in a VM ).
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 10/23/2012 01:46 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Also, it's probably better I mention connecting here so all the crazy
solutions get mentioned. Dynamic IP, located in Ohio, US. I have
several spare UNIX systems to run a bridge on, and I would prefer to
get several systems connected (what area should I use? I'll get back
with node names once I figure out how to change them in RSTS/E and
TOPS-20) I'm not very good with using emacs, maybe I should just
stick with a more basic editor. Or find a better terminal emulator I
don't have any real DEC terminals or any real DEC hardware yet.
Where in Ohio? I'm in western PA, just a hair northeast of Pittsburgh.
Near Columbus.
Ahh ok, so 3-3.5hrs out. Not too bad.
I can hook you up with some hardware. I have, erm, a bit of a surplus
at the moment.
What do you have as surplus?
Good heavens, that's a loaded question. ;)
On-topic, if you're hurting for VAXen, I can free up a 4000-series machine.
Off toppic, and off the top of my head, probably a dozen racks' worth of comparatively recent Sun hardware. And Crays. These would involve some serious swappage, though.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Al 23/10/12 02:19, En/na Johnny Billquist ha escrit:
Nice idea. Or the libc from DECUS C?
Hmm yes. Will there be compiler compatibility issues there? (like
with anything done in assembler, asm/C interface etc?)
You could use the DECUS C libc, but you need to rewrite part of it. I bet the calling convention for gcc isn't the same as for DECUS C. Also, DECUS C does not expect to run on bare metal, so some basic I/O functionality needs to be written as well.
But this is all pretty simple if you know your assembler.
Well, gas (the GNU assembler) is not source-compatible with MACRO-11, so there would be some previous work before even trying to compile the stuff... For a starter, gas uses the '$' symbol to prefix immediate arguments, while MACRO-11 uses '#'. And this one is easy, since gas can work in a sort of "compatibility mode". The macro and symbol handling is also different, and some pseudoinstructions are different... Nothing that can't be worker around, but it would be a lot of work. The 2.11 BSD libc, on the other hand, is mostly written inC, and the parts in assembler are written for the BSD assembler, which is much more compatible with gas, and the calling standard is the same (R0 and R1 get clobbered, the return value comes in R0 for words and R0:R1 for longs, the called routine saves R3-R5, R5 is the frame pointer and the caller cleans the stack after the return). Oh, and the BSD license is liberal enough to not to worry about those pesky issues; (I have not checked the DECUS-C license though).
On 23 Oct 2012, at 11:29, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 10/22/2012 04:06 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Was anyone ever crazy enough to try to implement any DECnet bits for
4.3BSD?
Nope, not outside of Ultrix. I wonder if the sources ever escaped DEC.
Wait, I have the source code to Ultrix 4.2a. I wonder if it's in there.
Hmm, I wonder as well.
Also, it's probably better I mention connecting here so all the crazy
solutions get mentioned. Dynamic IP, located in Ohio, US. I have
several spare UNIX systems to run a bridge on, and I would prefer to
get several systems connected (what area should I use? I'll get back
with node names once I figure out how to change them in RSTS/E and
TOPS-20) I'm not very good with using emacs, maybe I should just
stick with a more basic editor. Or find a better terminal emulator I
don't have any real DEC terminals or any real DEC hardware yet.
Where in Ohio? I'm in western PA, just a hair northeast of Pittsburgh.
Near Columbus.
I can hook you up with some hardware. I have, erm, a bit of a surplus
at the moment.
What do you have as surplus?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 10/22/2012 04:06 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Was anyone ever crazy enough to try to implement any DECnet bits for
4.3BSD?
Nope, not outside of Ultrix. I wonder if the sources ever escaped DEC.
Wait, I have the source code to Ultrix 4.2a. I wonder if it's in there.
Also, it's probably better I mention connecting here so all the crazy
solutions get mentioned. Dynamic IP, located in Ohio, US. I have
several spare UNIX systems to run a bridge on, and I would prefer to
get several systems connected (what area should I use? I'll get back
with node names once I figure out how to change them in RSTS/E and
TOPS-20) I'm not very good with using emacs, maybe I should just
stick with a more basic editor. Or find a better terminal emulator I
don't have any real DEC terminals or any real DEC hardware yet.
Where in Ohio? I'm in western PA, just a hair northeast of Pittsburgh.
I can hook you up with some hardware. I have, erm, a bit of a surplus
at the moment.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
IIRCV there was a bunch of discussion on http://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs in 2004 about the tapes and how to boot them
On Oct 22, 2012, at 6:56 PM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com> wrote:
Hello!
Does anyone have any experience with the collection of tapes that
contain Ultrix-11 there? I have them, and, ah, I'm still working out
the details behind everything.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On 2012-10-23 00:07, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/22/2012 05:35 PM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
The main barrier to a bare metal binary, or for that matter a not so
bare metal one, is the supporting libraries. I did a *really* crude
hack job on newlib to give me just enough bare metal support that I
could run the GCC test suite under SIMH. But that certainly isn't
enough for real bare metal.
A pdp11 port of newlib would be a nice project.
I tried... But it is too big. I think I got a fatty library because I
selected the floating point support... I tried to use sprintf() and it
didn't even fit into the PDP address space :(.
The printf() family is GIGANTIC. In newlib there are non-FP-enabled
versions of those functions; iprintf(), siprintf(), etc. They are much,
much smaller than their floating-point counterparts. I suggest you try
again with that and see where things land.
I'm using them on ARM7 with great results. Granted that's got a much
larger address space, but my resultant binaries and stack utilization
are still pretty small.
The 2.11BSD lib looks
leaner, and I am using it in my pet OS project (I pick the pieces I need
"on the run", I have not done a complete port... yet).
If the above suggestion doesn't get you anywhere, perhaps avrlibc
could be hacked into a PDP-11 library. All of the hardware support will
have to be ripped out of course, but there are nice tight
implementations of generic library functions in there.
Nice idea. Or the libc from DECUS C?
Hmm yes. Will there be compiler compatibility issues there? (like
with anything done in assembler, asm/C interface etc?)
You could use the DECUS C libc, but you need to rewrite part of it. I bet the calling convention for gcc isn't the same as for DECUS C. Also, DECUS C does not expect to run on bare metal, so some basic I/O functionality needs to be written as well.
But this is all pretty simple if you know your assembler.
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
Hello!
Does anyone have any experience with the collection of tapes that
contain Ultrix-11 there? I have them, and, ah, I'm still working out
the details behind everything.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On 10/22/2012 05:35 PM, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:
The main barrier to a bare metal binary, or for that matter a not so
bare metal one, is the supporting libraries. I did a *really* crude
hack job on newlib to give me just enough bare metal support that I
could run the GCC test suite under SIMH. But that certainly isn't
enough for real bare metal.
A pdp11 port of newlib would be a nice project.
I tried... But it is too big. I think I got a fatty library because I
selected the floating point support... I tried to use sprintf() and it
didn't even fit into the PDP address space :(.
The printf() family is GIGANTIC. In newlib there are non-FP-enabled
versions of those functions; iprintf(), siprintf(), etc. They are much,
much smaller than their floating-point counterparts. I suggest you try
again with that and see where things land.
I'm using them on ARM7 with great results. Granted that's got a much
larger address space, but my resultant binaries and stack utilization
are still pretty small.
The 2.11BSD lib looks
leaner, and I am using it in my pet OS project (I pick the pieces I need
"on the run", I have not done a complete port... yet).
If the above suggestion doesn't get you anywhere, perhaps avrlibc
could be hacked into a PDP-11 library. All of the hardware support will
have to be ripped out of course, but there are nice tight
implementations of generic library functions in there.
Nice idea. Or the libc from DECUS C?
Hmm yes. Will there be compiler compatibility issues there? (like
with anything done in assembler, asm/C interface etc?)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA