@Sampsa:
There was wordperfect on VMS? Wow.
I used to use the shared version of it on SCO in the early 90's. I
didn't know there was a VMS version. That'd be interesting to see.
Al.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On
Behalf Of Sampsa Laine
Sent: Thursday, 7 June 2012 8:50 PM
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Introducing myself... and my little network
Speaking of old software, does anybody happen to have WordPerfect for
VMS
lying around?
Would love to play with that..
Sampsa
On 7 Jun 2012, at 11:48, Jordi Guillaumes i Pons wrote:
Al 07/06/12 12:11, En/na hvlems at zonnet.nl ha escrit:
Jordi,
You wrote that the NIC on the 4000-90 was broken. Did you try an
external
transceiver on the AUI connector (there's a switch on the back).
An Alllied Telesys or DEC transceiver might solve the issue. The
logic that
drives the BNC connector is on a separate module IIRC.
I didn't. Actually, I thought you needed a thickwire segment to use
a
transceiver and a drop cable. I should have researched it better. Any
idea of the
DEC name for that thinwire transceiver? (Or a compabtible one).
Anyways, I
think I canibalized that machine a little bit, so I'm not sure what is
actually
inside of the inclosure. It looks like a nice summer vacation project
:)
If you need software kits for the VAX, post your needs. If I have
the kit(s) I'll
burn them on a CD. Hans
Oh, thanks. As I said, I've plenty of "modern" stuff, but I miss
some of the
older software I used back in those days (pre-5.0), a (call it
nostalgia) I'm quite
trying to reproduce that first environment I worked on. Right now, I
miss:
- FMS
- TDMS
- VAX BASIC
- LSE
That's pretty all. I also used AI1 (the dreaded office package) but
I'm not sure
I'll want to fight that monster again ;). No need to burn a CD, we
could arrange
the transfer by network (HECnet or regular internet). I understand the
use of
that stuff is covered by the hobbyist license (not sure about TDMS
though), so
we would not do anything out of the law.
On 06/07/2012 07:08 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
Is this the same as DECnet-DOS? I ran that a long time ago. Does
anyone have a copy? It included drivers for that weird DEC ISA Ethernet
card, the DEPCA, which was a full-length 8-bit board that also included
(strangely) a mouse interface.
I have the programs for that thing. (Don't have the card.) I, ah, made
a copy of the programs onto a floppy from a PC/AT that I was repairing
for a customer, oh say about twenty years ago.
The customer, (not mine Dave the store I was working at) was a student
at one of the schools, (college) who had a remarkable DEC installation
running at it, it might have been Columbia. I found the card in it,
and asked the manager who was double checking my work, as was his
wont, and of course he didn't know what it was. I found out later what
it was, and yes it was what you've described.
I'd love a copy of that stuff, if you can arrange it.
Obviously I never got the stuff to connect to a for real DEC setup,
but heck it would be fun to try and do so.
Indeed!
By the way Dave outside your door is a well dressed gentleman in a
suit that looks like something a certain outrageous poet and author
wore, and has hair to match. (Hint: its the same daft stuff I
sometimes pull on Sampsa.) There's also a blue colored box
outside.........
Ok, you lost me there, my friend.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On 06/07/2012 09:10 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
Oh my field density equalizers!
So THAT'S what they're calling them now. ;)
That gizmo is the one.
I thought so!
And if I had the space I'd track the thing down, again. I already have
an M68K based VME board here. My problem isn't now finding a card cage
for it, its working on how to get our old friend Tux working there.
VME card cages aren't too tough to find. They're used all over the
industrial world, though, which keeps the prices high. Best to find one
at a surplus place who doesn't sell into industry much.
Well someday perhaps. If you do find the time to get it working with
your favorite OS, can you do me a favor and work on how to get me
access onto it?
Of course!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 06/07/2012 08:29 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
I don't know why, but here goes, a while ago there were advertisements
for a thing DEC called the "rtVAX", it was the processor element in a
case about the size of a paperback and mounted on a VME board.
Like this one?
http://www.neurotica.com/misc/rtVAX-300-1.jpghttp://www.neurotica.com/misc/rtVAX-300-2.jpg
I picked that up at a hamfest just this past weekend! =)
The rtVAX-300 is significantly smaller than a paperback, by the way.
If memory serves, it contains a CVAX chipset, an Ethernet controller
(SGEC I think), and some ROM.
They advertised it as an embedded processor for specialty
applications. The user would, what else? build their code on a host
such as what we are talking about and including the implied
difficulties of debugging it of course, and then deploy it onto the
unit's storage media. And then off it went wearing the code written
and the rest of it on something else.
Why I want one (or two or three or four) is any number of reasons, but
it would be an interesting job getting one of the things working on
our network.
I think it wouldn't be too tough to get most any OS running on it that
supports a CVAX-based machine. I'm looking forward to messing with it.
It's on a 6U VME module made by Aeon, and with it I also got a 6U VME
mass storage module (a SCSI hard drive, and a floppy drive with a SCSI
bridge board) and a very nice card cage with attached power supply.
There's also a Motorola MVME-series 68040 CPU board in the card cage.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Hello!
Oh my field density equalizers!
That gizmo is the one.
And if I had the space I'd track the thing down, again. I already have
an M68K based VME board here. My problem isn't now finding a card cage
for it, its working on how to get our old friend Tux working there.
Well someday perhaps. If you do find the time to get it working with
your favorite OS, can you do me a favor and work on how to get me
access onto it?
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
PATHWORKS V6 supplies a DECnet "stack" for DOS and Windows (16-bit).
-Steve
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Joe Ferraro
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 22:05
To: hecnet at update.uu.se
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Size of HECnet
On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 7:13 PM, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
I've got a Windows NT 4.0 VM up occasionally too..
Sampsa
boy that gives me bad memories of long days ... perhaps you should've gone for NT 3.50 while you were at it... I do have a Win 3.11 box running... perhaps there's a decnet stack for it?!!?
On 06/07/2012 08:29 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
I don't know why, but here goes, a while ago there were advertisements
for a thing DEC called the "rtVAX", it was the processor element in a
case about the size of a paperback and mounted on a VME board.
Like this one?
http://www.neurotica.com/misc/rtVAX-300-1.jpghttp://www.neurotica.com/misc/rtVAX-300-2.jpg
I picked that up at a hamfest just this past weekend! =)
The rtVAX-300 is significantly smaller than a paperback, by the way.
If memory serves, it contains a CVAX chipset, an Ethernet controller
(SGEC I think), and some ROM.
They advertised it as an embedded processor for specialty
applications. The user would, what else? build their code on a host
such as what we are talking about and including the implied
difficulties of debugging it of course, and then deploy it onto the
unit's storage media. And then off it went wearing the code written
and the rest of it on something else.
Why I want one (or two or three or four) is any number of reasons, but
it would be an interesting job getting one of the things working on
our network.
I think it wouldn't be too tough to get most any OS running on it that
supports a CVAX-based machine. I'm looking forward to messing with it.
It's on a 6U VME module made by Aeon, and with it I also got a 6U VME
mass storage module (a SCSI hard drive, and a floppy drive with a SCSI
bridge board) and a very nice card cage with attached power supply.
There's also a Motorola MVME-series 68040 CPU board in the card cage.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
On Jun 7, 2012, at 7:10 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 06/07/2012 08:23 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Howabout starting it as a daemon (running as root) via the boot
scripts, and have non-root users's programs access it via a
socket?
Cool idea - you could even have multiple hosts connect this way but
export one DECNET endpoint, i.e. run CTERM on Box A whilst FAL goes
to Box B, and MAIL to Box C :)
Yes, you could multiplex/demultiplex it any way you wanted. It would
open up all sorts of interesting configuration possibilities.
I think it would help if you actually explained a little more what you
actually want to accomplish, and what you see as the problems...?
We're just batting some ideas around. One problem is that the current
DECnet stack for Linux has fallen into dismaintenance, and if that can't
be changed, it will eventually stop working on current-ish kernels. The
idea is to write a userland (meaning outside the kernel, not running
under a non-root UID) implementation of DECnet and have non-root users'
apps (dncopy, etc) talk to it via a local socket.
That made me think of something... it could be split. If root privs are needed to get Ethernet to do the DECnet MAC address thing (promiscuous or otherwise), one could have a daemon that runs as root that implements the Ethernet datalink layer. Have it communicate with a non-root daemon that does the rest of the protocol stack; that in turn communicates with the applications.
Worth it? Perhaps not. If people aren't worried about having the whole stack in a program with root privs, then this isn't necessary.
BTW, another thing that such an implementation should do is implement DDCMP. I looked at it once as a module that ties into the terminal driver ("line discipline", was that what it's called???). But in the user mode way of looking at it, a DDCMP layer implementation would simply be a bit of plain old application code that talks to a terminal port configured in raw mode.
paul
On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 7:55 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 06/07/2012 07:42 PM, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Lunchboxes! :-) And there are images for new boot ROMs available for
those
which will allow you to boot from the on-board SCSI host adapter, ...
I've heard of this, but I haven't seen it. As I recall, the onboard SCSI
adapter uses programmed I/O (no DMA!) so it's really slow. For a TK50
nobody would ever notice, but for the system disk it's a problem. Better to
cluster boot one, diskless.
That'd likely be faster! I'm thinking of the case where one would
want a standalone machine, and the XT2190/RD54 is as capacious as MFM gets.
Having never run a '2000 via its SCSI host adapter myself, only the
MFM interface, I'd have to wonder whether the bottleneck would be that
PIO-accessed NCR5380 or the 78032 itself!
FWIW, an RD54 isn't necessary. The 2000 can easily be convinced to use
_any_ MFM drive, DEC or not. You can get VMS V4 on a 30 meg drive, maybe
even 20, if you're determined. Long ago I wrote up a little description of
all the VS 2000 disk formatter parameters, what they meant, and how to fake
them for non-DEC drives. Google ancient Usenet postings if you're
interested.
I've had a copy of that archived away for many, many years. :-)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Hello!
I don't know why, but here goes, a while ago there were advertisements
for a thing DEC called the "rtVAX", it was the processor element in a
case about the size of a paperback and mounted on a VME board.
They advertised it as an embedded processor for specialty
applications. The user would, what else? build their code on a host
such as what we are talking about and including the implied
difficulties of debugging it of course, and then deploy it onto the
unit's storage media. And then off it went wearing the code written
and the rest of it on something else.
Why I want one (or two or three or four) is any number of reasons, but
it would be an interesting job getting one of the things working on
our network.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On 06/07/2012 07:42 PM, Bob Armstrong wrote:
Lunchboxes! :-) And there are images for new boot ROMs available for
those
which will allow you to boot from the on-board SCSI host adapter, ...
I've heard of this, but I haven't seen it. As I recall, the onboard SCSI
adapter uses programmed I/O (no DMA!) so it's really slow. For a TK50
nobody would ever notice, but for the system disk it's a problem. Better to
cluster boot one, diskless.
That'd likely be faster! I'm thinking of the case where one would
want a standalone machine, and the XT2190/RD54 is as capacious as MFM gets.
Having never run a '2000 via its SCSI host adapter myself, only the
MFM interface, I'd have to wonder whether the bottleneck would be that
PIO-accessed NCR5380 or the 78032 itself!
FWIW, an RD54 isn't necessary. The 2000 can easily be convinced to use
_any_ MFM drive, DEC or not. You can get VMS V4 on a 30 meg drive, maybe
even 20, if you're determined. Long ago I wrote up a little description of
all the VS 2000 disk formatter parameters, what they meant, and how to fake
them for non-DEC drives. Google ancient Usenet postings if you're
interested.
I've had a copy of that archived away for many, many years. :-)
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Lunchboxes! :-) And there are images for new boot ROMs available for
those
which will allow you to boot from the on-board SCSI host adapter, ...
I've heard of this, but I haven't seen it. As I recall, the onboard SCSI
adapter uses programmed I/O (no DMA!) so it's really slow. For a TK50
nobody would ever notice, but for the system disk it's a problem. Better to
cluster boot one, diskless.
FWIW, an RD54 isn't necessary. The 2000 can easily be convinced to use
_any_ MFM drive, DEC or not. You can get VMS V4 on a 30 meg drive, maybe
even 20, if you're determined. Long ago I wrote up a little description of
all the VS 2000 disk formatter parameters, what they meant, and how to fake
them for non-DEC drives. Google ancient Usenet postings if you're
interested.
Bob