Is anyone here in communication with Oscar Vermeulen? The last communication with me was on March 17 just after he drove back from Holland. He is usually a prompt and casually chatty fellow,
Thanks
Supratim
---
Supratim Sanyal, W1XMT
39.19151 N, 77.23432 W
QCOCAL::SANYAL via HECnet
See below for a link to a g-drive file containing a ZIP archive of the DEC research group implementation of Smalltalk for the VAX.
If someone has a VT125 to try it on I would appreciate seeing an image of the screen with Smalltalk running.
Begin forwarded message:
> From: Nigel Williams <nw at retroComputingTasmania.com>
> Date: 7 April 2020 at 10:33:55 pm AEST
> To: John Ames <commodorejohn at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: VAX/Smalltalk-80?
>
> ?
>>
>>>> On 2 Apr 2020, at 10:08 am, John Ames via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>>> I know from the book "Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice"
>>
>> Thanks for the reminder about the VMS version, as you likely know
>> their paper about VAX Smalltalk was in an early DEC Technical Journal
>> too.
>>
>> ...while the second ran under VMS and was actually developed
>> within DEC. This version - VAX/Smalltalk-80 - was headed up by Stoney
>> Ballard and Stephen Shirron; anybody know if there's a surviving copy
>> out there, if it was ever available outside DEC to begin with?
>
> I contacted Stephen and he kindly provided a ZIP
>
> https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NvO-ULropJ9xyT-WFqalXY79FBt6tdfB
>
> I had a quick look and it will need an early VMS I suspect, around
> version 4.x (might work on a later version).
>
> cheers,
> nigel.
In order to better debug and develop my Multinet compatible link for
RSX, I think should set up a VMS box locally with Multinet.
I do have a VAX or two around, which currently are running TCPIP
services from HP.
So, how do I switch? I've never actually used Multinet before.
Where do I find it? How do I get a license? Anything in particular I
should be aware of when installing it?
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
Does anyone know where I can find this version of the kit? I would
like to add IMAP support to the STRGTE:: cluster.
Thanks!
-Steve
Steve Davidson
Hollis, NH (US)
STRGTE::SYSTEM or STRGTE::DAVIDSON
I have obtained a MicroVAX 3100-80 with a Storageworks pizza box, a CD-ROM drive, a tape drive, some cables and no monitor.
It powers on, does not smoke or explode. The 8 LEDs at the back settle down to all on except 2 and 3 counting from zero on the right. I can hear a hard disk spin up.
The cables include two MMJs. I have a PC with a 9-pin female serial connector. It runs Linux.
The first two of many questions: does the ?0? connector connect to the console? What exactly do I need to do to connect the PC?s serial port to the MMJ cable? Note: I have passable soldering skills.
Next question will be about the BNC connector and networking. One thing at a time.
Here are some pictures: https://photos.app.goo.gl/KduorZEimMQ73bMdA
Thanks in advance
Supratim
---
Supratim Sanyal, W1XMT
39.19151 N, 77.23432 W
QCOCAL::SANYAL via HECnet
Still looking for things to do at home here, so I've set up another PDP-11
with RT11 this time. I have v5.7 up and running just fine, but I'd really
like to network it and I can't find a copy of DECnet-RT anywhere. Can
someone send me a pointer?
BTW, was DECnet-RT ever upgraded to Phase IV or did it stop with III?
Yes, I know there's a TCP/IP for RT11. I might actually end up using that
instead, but I'd prefer to have it on HECnet if I can.
Thanks,
Bob
I\m currently experimenting with some new code for Multinet under RSX.
Seems like VMS don\t really like me at the moment, so Multinet links
between Mim and VMS systems might not be working well. PyDECnet is
working fine.
I'll try to get this working as soon as possible, but for VMS systems,
expect there to be issues during today...
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 everyone,
some time ago I discovered that several images downloaded from the
VaxHaven CD-ROM image archive appear to be corrupted. Actually they are not
really corrupted: they just include not only sector data from the original
media but also CD-ROM sector preambles and error-correcting codes which are
usually skipped when dumping discs with e.g. the UNIX 'dd' command.
In other words, CD-ROM raw sectors are made of a 16 byte preamble, a 2048
byte data area, and a 288 checksum (Reed-Solomon) for a total of 2352 bytes
whereas audio CDs use the whole 2352 bytes in another way (channel frames).
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM for more information.
Since I usually mount these disc images directly on VMS with the LD driver,
I wanted to find a native way to "clean" them which would not require any
additional software besides whatever is available on a standard VMS system.
After downloading and unpacking some affected image, the first thing to do
is to ensure that it has some sensible RMS attributes:
$ SET FILE /ATTR=(RFM=FIX,LRL=2352,RAT=NONE) AG-Q2PLL-XE.ISO
Then we will use the Sort/Merge utility to fix it. To do so we need a file
to instruct the utility on how to manipulate data records both in input and
output. Let's call it CDFIX.SRT and store it with the following lines:
/FIELD=(NAME=HEAD, POSITION= 1, SIZE= 16)
/FIELD=(NAME=BODY, POSITION= 17, SIZE=2048)
/FIELD=(NAME=TAIL, POSITION=2065, SIZE= 288)
/DATA=BODY
Finally we could run the utility to extract the good portion from every
record of the original image:
$ MERGE /NOCHECK /STAT /SPEC=CDFIX AG-Q2PLL-XE.ISO AG-Q2PLL-XE_FIXED.ISO
This is the result on a somewhat slow system. Note the input and output
record length on the right column:
OpenVMS Sort/Merge Statistics
Records read: 304468 Input record length: 2352
Records sorted: 304468 Internal length: 6761
Records output: 304468 Output record length: 2048
Working set: 65536 Sort tree size: 0
Virtual memory: 416 Number of initial runs: 1
Direct I/O: 81792 Maximum merge order: 1
Buffered I/O: 8 Number of merge passes: 1
Page faults: 35 Work file alloc: 0
Elapsed time: 00:04:25.92 Elapsed CPU: 00:00:32.98
Anyway, a friend of mine provided me with a short Python program which
achieves the same result:
with open("AG-Q2PLL-XE.iso", "rb") as fr:
with open("AG-Q2PLL-XE-fixed.iso", "wb") as fw:
byte = 'somedata'
while byte != "":
_ = fr.read(16)
byte = fr.read(2048)
fw.write(byte)
_ = fr.read(288)
I didn't test any of the above with every image in the archive, but I
suppose that the "corrupted" ones have all the same problem.
HTH, :)
G.
