[HECnet] Questions about the E11 version 0.9 release

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote: On Wed, 24 Apr 2013, Gregg Levine wrote: Hello! In going over my collection of things PDP-11 I came across a some what startling discovery. That of this one, I have nearly all the releases of E11 from the 0.8 one all the way to the recent one. The 0.9 release was retrieved from GENIE back when it was trying to be the same as Compuserve, and that was around 1994. (Both have since folded it seems.) At the time I was just beginning to understand exactly what I had obtained from that site. I didn't. I do now. Now that's going back a ways! Now I've gone and read all or nearly all of the documentation file that it came with. There are two instructions there, one of is the SWITCH one, and I quote here: "SET SWITCH n SET SWITCH PORT n If PORT is specified, specifies the octal 80x86 I/O address of a word port which when read as a word, gives the current 16-bit switch register value. Otherwise (PORT not specified), sets the value of the emulated SR to the octal number n. " And the other one is named this DISPLAY one, and I quote here: "SET DISPLAY NONE SET DISPLAY PORT n If PORT is specified, specifies the octal 80x86 I/O address of a word port which when written as a word, sets the 16-bit display register. If NONE is specified, then anything written to the DR by the PDP-11 is ignored (the default condition). So if you want to see pretty blinky lights, get out your wire wrap tool and a couple of 74LS273s and whatever else." And of course my question is one of, were those actually tested with real hardware attached? John I imagine you are aware that these early releases are floating all over the Internet? ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." -- Cory Smelosky http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments Hello! Yes and by sorting through the documentation between the versions we can see how the entire business evolved. At one point John worked with Bob of the SIMH fraternity to confirm that each function behaves appropriately. Bob it turns out was part of the J-11 development team back then. For a lot of us its common to start our ideas using SIMH for testing ideas, and that also includes networking configuration problems. And when it becomes necessary to run them full time they'd get moved to E11 obviously for the fun of it, as a hobbyist motivation For myself regarding those two commands for the E11 version 0.9 release, I discovered that it might be possible to make work some of my ideas. Now to track down the hosting hardware...... ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."