Hi all,
My name is Lex van Roon, and for quite some time I've been lurking on
this list as a DEC/VMS enthusiast and today I got my link to HECnet
working with the help of Johnny.
Somewhere during the 90s, a high-school classmate of mine gave me a couple of
copies of Hacktic(*). In there I read about these operating systems with
weird names like VMS and UNIX, and since I only knew MS based OS's back
then, I was intrigued. I soon got my first Linux box running under x86,
and not long thereafter I got my first whitelabel Alpha mainboard, on
which I happily ran BSD and Linux. After dropping out of school, I went
to work as a sysadmin in the UNIX world during the end of the dotcom boom,
and nowadays I'm a DevOps engineer working for a large dutch .com.
As a hobby, I've been running various Alpha's (and other RISC iron) over
the years:
- Whitelabel AXPCI133
- AS1000 (lots of them)
- PWS 466au
- DS10/DS20/DS25
- ES47
and since a couple of years, I finally wiped UNIX off my Alpha's and
installed VMS, and have used them for various things. Mostly replicating
services I'd normally run under UNIX (dns, ntp, http), but also for
software development in C and Python(**). In this time, I've discovered
that it's very helpful to know people who know VMS very well (thnx
Steven Hoffman), and I am confident enough about my VMS skills
that I decided to join, since being in a DECnet with my own systems is
not such an interesting learning experience as working with 'the real
thing' :)
For now I'm online with the following two Alpha's:
REI / 1.540 / AlphaServer DS10 / 466MHz / 1GB ram / 2 x 18GB u2w 10k
PAI / 1.541 / AlphaServer DS25E / 1GHz / 1GB ram / 6 x 73GB u320 15k
In the future, I plan/hope to get my VAX 4000/200 connected, but that
system still needs some TLC before it will operate. Most likely I will
also spin up some emulated instances of various other DEC operating
systems in the future, for learning/discovery purposes.
The systems are connected to a 100mbit FttH uplink, located in Amersfoort,
The Netherlands and are available 24/7. I have not yet configured any guest
accounts, but I intend to do this.
Kind Regards,
Lex van Roon
*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack-Tic
**) https://github.com/r3boot/pki
--
LRO-RIPE | 570DE0BE | 9BF5 922E AF87 8584 E9CA C3AD C508 39A9 570D E0BE
Not sure if anyone really cares, but I figure it don't hurt to tell
anyway...
I have for many years used a very old version of MicroEMACS for RSX. I
eventually started searching around for alternatives, but realized
during that search that most Emacs clones are horribly huge (including
MicroEMACS), not portable at all (even if they claim to be), and
generally also expects to just allocate gobs of memory to keep all data
in ram.
Now, RSX, being a PDP-11 OS, have a 16-bit address space limitation. So
just allocating memory is never going to be a solution. There is a C
compiler, which is pretty much ANSI C. But it is not Unix, and gives you
the C standard IO library, but not low level Unix calls.
On the plus side, most of the library can sit in supervisor space, and
not consume any memory in your process space.
Clones I've looked at:
MicroEMACS - Huge and difficult to port. Use lots of memory.
JOVE - Small (runs on 2.11BSD), but horribly difficult to port.
mg - Huge and difficult. Use lots of memory.
AMIS - Huge, and written in Pascal. Not necessarily bad, but adapting
the code to a new system requires mucking around some, made worse by the
small differences in different Pascal compilers, and the lack of any
preprocessor, as well as the bonehead type system in Pascal. Also use
lots of memory, but it has been made to run on small machines (including
PDP-11 with RSTS/E) in the past, so it is a solveable problem.
Atto - Hard to port.
JED - Huge.
I looked at dozens more, which were not even worth looking deeper into,
or to list here.
The long and short of it was that, even though there are numerous
implementations out there, they all suck, from my point of view.
With all that in mind, I decided to write my own Emacs clone instead
(yes, I got horribly upset with the lousy quality of most code I looked
at, if someone wants to hear some rants, contact me privately).
I started about a month ago, and at this point, it's working, and quite
useful. And I guess if other people are in a similar situation, they
might be interested in looking into this, and possibly make use of it.
Quick run through:
. ANSI C sources.
. Mostly uses the C standard IO library. Exception is terminal I/O,
which requires some small pieces reimplemented if you want to port it.
So, if you have an ANSI C compiler, porting should be very low effort.
. Only works on ANSI terminals today. It would be doable to extend with
other terminal support, but I don't have any need, and since I do not
have, nor want to depend on curses, it will require coding to either
have a module to uses curses, if that is wanted, or handling of specific
terminals.
. The compiled code, using PDP-11 C, ends (at the moment) up at around
36 Kbytes of binary. The C library and RMS sits mostly in supervisor
mode, and is not accounted for in this.
. Data usage is about 8K for various storage and strings.
. Code dependecies are very much in a tree, so overlaying is easy, if
wanted/needed, and that capability exists on the host.
. Since I compile with split I/D space, this means than about 56K of
dataspace can be used for buffering of various sorts.
. File buffers are kept in a temporary file, and read/written to memory
as needed (pretty much a demand-paging virtual memory implementation in
the application).
. The virtual, paged memory is about 4G, which is an absolute limit on
memory usage. Practical file limit is (I would guesstimate) around 1G.
. Most basic EMACS editing functions are implemented, including split
windows, multiple buffers, kill buffer, moving around in various ways,
and some semi-stupid automatic indentation handling for C code. Also
incremental searching in a proper fashion.
. Speed, tested on a real PDP-11/93 is pretty acceptable. Testing on a
file about 1000 lines takes a couple of second to open, and a couple of
seconds if you try to search from the start to the end. Most other
things move faster.
. The program is not suitable for editing binary data. The C standard
I/O library don't really lend itself to binary I/O, and this code have
to live within those constraints.
There are still lots of functionality that I'm working on adding, such
as repeats (almost done) and macros (only started thinking about it).
If people have functions they consider extra important, let me know, and
I'll see if I can add them. If people want to contribute code, I'll be
happy to incorporate changes as well, as long as they make sense.
The sources, as well as a compiled RSX-11M-PLUS binary for PDP-11 C
V1.2, can be found at HECnet: MIM::DU:[NEMA], or
ftp:://nema at mim.update.uu.se/.
This editor is now installed as ...EMA on MIM::, so if you type "EMA
filename", you can see how it works there.
It is now my tool for doing further development. I have ditched
MicroEMACS. So I'm constantly testing the thing, as I am developing
it... :-)
Maybe someone will find it useful...
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
Hi,
I wonder if someone has been succesful repairing the corrupted tpc images of several PDP-11 layered products that are (not)available in some sites (bitsavers and trailing-edge come to memory). IIRC there was a kind of effort to fix whatever could be fixed (the BRU format ones, specifically) reordering the mangled tape blocks in the image.
More specifically, I?m looking for an usable COBOL-81 compiler. The one which is not corrupted (cobol_v4_4) is COBOL/C11, not COBOL 81, and even for hobbyist stuff, handling COBOL-74 is a PITA?
Best regards to all.
Jordi Guillaumes
Hello,
I've got an RSX-11M+ VM up (real hardware whenever I get my boards
shipped...) and I've got a question:
Is the FMS-11 tape on trailing-edge ftp corrupted? Can it be used to
pe4rform an install?
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
I've put up two new systems:
MARDUK at 61.151 is a simh emulated pdp11/93 running RSTS/E v9.6 with DECnet.
ENKIDU at 61.152 is a simh emulated VAX running OpenVMS 7.3 with DECnet and IP.
This is in addition to GLGMSH (Gilgamesh) at 61.150, the KLH10 TOPS-20
system I've been running for many years.
All are located in San Jose, CA. Johnny, if you could add my two new
systems to the nodedb, I would appreciate it. And to Dave M., these
will be pretty low volume net usage, so impact on your link should be
minimal to unnoticeable.
Should anyone want an account, feel free to contact me. More users = more fun!
Thanks!
-Mark
Time for a new release announcement of TCP/IP for RSX-11M-PLUS.
A couple of fixes have been done since the last release.
At this point, the TCP/IP and tools seem to be very stable and usable.
MIM, which is my main test machine have been up and running for a month.
During that time, the machine have send out around 8G of data over TCP,
had about 28500 connections established, blocked about 17000 packets
from about 1000 spammers, had about 700 logins over telnet, and
basically been very busy, while not falling over or failing.
These are quite fun numbers, and I do feel a bit proud about them as
well. I don't think DEC ever envisioned an RSX system doing that.
I should also point out that I have not had a crash because of TCP/IP in
a very long time. But since I have often been doing various tests and
changes, uptime have often not been that long anyway. But right now I
feel that I do not have any pressing needs for things to fix in the
network stack, and have start to focus more on applications.
Things that have been done since the last release:
TCP:
- Made some transmit and receive statistics 64 bit wide. Numbers started
wrapping...
- Added smarter ACK probing for packets received out of sequence, which
improves transmission rates and lost connection detection.
- Added ability to set keepalive time on a per connection basis.
Telnet:
- Added spoof detection for telnet connections.
As usual, the distribution is available from:
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.dsk
ftp://mim.update.uu.se/bqtcp.tap
ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/rsx/tcpip/tcpip.dsk
The documentation is also available through ftp on Mim, or also at
http://mim.update.uu.se/tcpipdoc
Note! I've realized that BQTCP/IP do not work right if you have a
PDP-11/74 with multiple processors online. I'll fix that at some point,
as it's probably just a case of affinity not being set on devices, nor
relevant processes. This might only be a problem with telnet in fact. I
know for sure that the IP and TCP drivers works ok in multiprocessor
systems.
The one thing I might do some additional work on in the near future
is improving the DNS resolver. It should not affect any existing code,
but is something needed before I can do SMTP.
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
Hey Johnny, for the past few days if I try to access
http://madame.update.uu.se/nodedb, I get the banner and the search
box, but below that it only says "585 matches. Execute or extend
access denied to USERS".
It used to give the full list. Trying to search gives the same error,
and no displayed results.
Something broken?
-Mark
On 2016-05-31 17:10, Sampsa Laine wrote:
> Why don?t one of you RSX gurus port ?joe? to RSX?
>
> OK it?s not emacs but it?s quite small and has enough functionality..
"Small" in this case is more than 10 times the size of NEMA... :-)
But if someone wants to try, I can answer questions.
Johnny
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 06:10:41PM +0300, Sampsa Laine wrote:
>Why don???t one of you RSX gurus port ???joe??? to RSX?
>OK it???s not emacs but it???s quite small and has enough functionality..
I'm thinking the point isn't: if only there were a nice editor, any
editor, that fits on RSX (those of us who grew up on EDT generally *love*
it already, and TECO is its own religion), but rather to accommodate
people's muscle memory and accept the commands they were already going to
type whether they meant to or not (which is why E11's built-in editor goes
in the other direction and uses the EDT/KED keypad layout).
John Wilson
D Bit
Is anyone maintaining an up-to-date DECdns server based off of Johnny's nodedb?
I've recently set up an emulated VAX (simh) at 61.152 called ENKIDU,
running OpenVMS 7.3. I was hoping to use DECdns for simple node name
resolution. In the interim I'm using Jordi's DECdns server (which he
mentioned a while ago), but it doesn't appear to be as up to date with
the official nodedb as I'd like. :)
Thanks,
Mark
