A VMS listing on Bitsavers? That will be worth a look, for
sure. I guess it would also include the NICE of the era?
Yes, I know Bliss. Or knew it... Bliss was a huge deal in Marlboro in the late 70's when I was around or at least corporate was trying to make it so. Any new hire was signed up for a Bliss Common class where the all the virtues of cross platform compilation were extolled. Bliss wasn't adopted as a replacement for any existing major 36 bit software system that I recall, with a few exceptions. So, I don't recall that any Tops-20 monitor modules were replaced. Nothing in the EXEC was, but the EXEC's PCL interpreter was written in Bliss.
As I recall, Bliss was used in the implementation of certain
languages. Not for Algol, which has one of the more interesting
macro sources I've seen. FORTRAN is.
Although somewhat cross platform (I.E. Tops-10 and Tops-20), Galaxy remained in assembler with the exception of the NICE process (NMLT20). This was originally written in assembler, as can be seen from the PHASE II Tops-20 DECnet sources but was eventually implemented in Bliss and not released. This caused a fair amount of ill will as early Bliss versions had stability issues and crashed regularly. I typed up a number of SPR's about that.
It would be an interesting question to see how much code was
actually shared for NICE; one assumes it could have been a fair
amount. The Tops-20 RMS-20 product appears to have a DAP
implementation in BLISS, so that will be worth looking at.
I think Bliss probably had greater platform penetration for VMS. The Kermit-10 is actually written in Bliss and will compile for both Tops-10 and VMS. In fact, because it uses Galaxy, it has compilation hooks for Tops-20, a number of which are implemented. I think it might be interesting to play around with that at some point as it appears to be an orphan now.
It's a shame about the lost specs, particularly if they were
adhered to, which appears to largely be the case with DECnet. For
certain Internet protocols, you just have to see what is going
over the wire and reverse engineer from that. Not the end of the
world, but not particularly pleasant, either.
On 5/31/23 7:31 PM, Paul Koning wrote: I have never seen one, which is odd because obviously both 6.0 and 7.0 were implemented and therefore must have existed. There are various other DECnet Phase IV era specs that appear to be lost, for example the IV-plus routing spec. I implemented bits of that in PyDECnet from memory (hopefully correctly...) but there are other things, like congestion control and equal cost path splitting, that I sure would like to see specified. There is a VMS 4.x listing set on Bitsavers (scanned microfiche) which I think includes DAP 7.0 code. I spent a little time reading through pieces of that when I was working on the DAP code in PyDECnet. So you might try that; chances are you know Bliss, which I do not. And/or you can look at the PyDECnet code, though of course then you'd be dealing with second generation reverse engineering.
On May 31, 2023, at 7:21 PM, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing@gmail.com> wrote: I finally put something together that is analogous to the RSX NFT /ID switch. Basically, it grabs a copy of the configuration message before negotiation and displays it later. So for VENTI2::, one sees: ... Gee, MIM:: does a lot of stuff, so I regrettably remain with a pretty bad case of data envy... And I really have to get off my butt and implement rename. Is there an ASCII version of DAP 7.1 anywhere on HECnet that I could download? I was curious about file preallocation whose bit is defined in the 5.6 document, but not really explained, as far as I saw.