7 Sep
2018
7 Sep
'18
4:43 p.m.
On Sep 6, 2018, at 4:47 PM, Jeffrey H. Johnson <jhj
at trnsz.com> wrote:
On Sep 6, 2018, at 4:41 PM, Zane Healy <healyzh at avanthar.com <mailto:healyzh at
avanthar.com>> wrote:
I?ve gotten into the GCOS TSS simulator on my Multics system, but that?s about the
extent.
Very cool! I just got my Multics system up and
running this last Sunday. I was a systems analyst on DPS-8 mainframes running GCOS-8 from
?90-93. I?ve come to the conclusion that not only is that knowledge all evaporated from
my head, it also wouldn?t really help with Multics. :-)
Oh no, a stinkin' GCOS user! Just kidding, of course. While we aren't running the
GCOS Daemon for batch/absentee GCOS processes (mainly because nobody has asked!), gtss,
the interactive GCOS TSS simulator does work, if you happen to have any GCOS tasks
you'd like to run. How on earth
did you manage to hook Multics up to HECnet?
It's a hugely abusive hack. Since the DECnet for Linux code is written in C, and the
FNP emulation is a C simulation of the FNP/MCS behavior, I've taken advantage of that
to simulate a hardwired protocol converter. This also means that rather than having to
(re-)implement much of the networking code in obscure MAP355/Level 6 assembly language,
the off-loaded networking code which would run on the FNP can run essentially natively on
the host. (The overall long-term goal, however, is eliminating host-based services and
'properly' emulating the Level 6 FNP at the instruction level.)
We a use additional emulated hardware infrastructure such as emulated terminal servers to
ease management, balance connections between FNPs, etc. In other cases there is Multics software which is
essentially 'extinct' but various descendants still exist, so we are working on
backporting/crossporting the existing software versions back to Multics - this includes
programming languages like XPL and SNOBOL, software packages like REDUCE, MACSYMA,
OMNITAB, TeX, etc.
Any sign of the Ada compiler? Though I gather it was a pretty poor imitation. One thing
I want to do is find my K&R C book, and see how the C compiler handles things. I was
working on learning C when I first started working at the DPS-8 installation I was at, and
the C Compiler we had was atrocious to put it kindly.
Feel free to review our system news (pmotd -a) to get
an idea of what we've been working on!
I logged back in this morning and reviewed that, a most impressive effort.
Zane