It does not appear that the VMS phone protocol was ever officially productized for Tops-20. It seems to have started out as a local development by Robert Brown of CSSE, which was taken over by Phil Budne, who was an LCG SWS and thus given a certain amount of internal DEC support.
It's got a number of issues, which I've rewritten up for later,
but nothing that would defeat its usage. Basically, it's crying
out to be brought up to Tops-20 7.1 standards and would
significantly benefit in other areas, the first being debugging
and the second being maintainability. Debugging
is always a challenge for multi-forking software, which--to a
certain extent--has to be designed to be debugged. Indeed, I've
stumbled over bugs in DDT exactly because I was messing around
with such multi-forking programs as FAL and the mail system.
I hasten to repeat (or re-paraphrase, if you will) what I've said
in the past: it's hardly fair to criticize software some thirty
years after the fact, especially when it has had no champion or
maven in all that time. And, I don't like doing that in any case
when nobody is around to answer questions, particularly the
original designers or authors.
For now, I've put this aside and continue to concentrate on
arriving at a release candidate for PANDA II. I'll send a brief
update on the current status later.
On 3/7/24 8:33 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
I might have reverse-engineered it at some point. I can't remember for sure. But I did look quite a lot at it at some point.
To answer Thomas - RSX-11M-PLUS have an implementation as well. But it's not a very good one, and I really should rewrite that thing.
The RSX version is written in BLISS, by the way.
And no, I've not found any "official" documentation for it.
Johnny
On 2024-03-08 02:23, Paul Koning wrote:
I don't believe it was documented by DEC, unlike applications such as FAL. But some memory says that Johnny Billquist did the reverse engineering and published the answers.
paul
On Mar 7, 2024, at 8:08 PM, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing@gmail.com> wrote:
Tops-20 has a version of the VMS PHONE protocol that I look at from time to time.
Is there a published specification for this anywhere? I'd like to maybe do some work on the Tops-20 code, but I'd prefer not to reverse engineer what I don't have to.
Besides VMS and Tops-20, what other systems speak PHONE?