[HECnet] New Digital Unix node TIGER on HECnet

On Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:30:43 +0200, you wrote: TOPS-10 (could it even connect to DECnet?) It can! About a couple of years ago we were able to run DECnet Phase IV on Ethernet, by running TOPS-10 7.04 on the KLH10 emulator. Alas, to idle the emulator, the TOPS-10 monitor has to be modified so that it would make some I/O to a special device which would trigger the idle code into the emulator, but we never figured out how to do that. Given that TOPS-10 comes with full sources and that the instructions to be added to the monitor are just two or three MACRO-10 lines, that's the easy part of the task. Instead, problems arise when it's time to actually generate a new monitor from sources. There is a guided procedure called MONGEN which asks for some parameters and then generates some source files used to conditionally assemble and link a new monitor (it reminds me of some very old "make config"). That whole task is quite easy to follow and we were very happy with it, but then we discovered that it cannot be used to completely rebuild the monitor, as it assembles some minor code and relinks everything against a big TOPS10.REL file which is indeed the monitor major block. There are provisions to rebuild TOPS10.REL, but the Software Installation Guide just directs to Appendix B, where it is suggested that, for more information about building the monitor library file, we should read the batch control file COMPIL.CTL. Unfortunately, COMPIL.CTL does not contain any comment or explanation and we think it is intended for somebody with a previous somewhat deep knowledge about such tasks, which we do not have. Even the relevant manuals are not overly clear about this topic, and many little details are left to immagination (or knowledge, as said). We obviously needed (and still need) the idle function because of power- consumption-related problems, so we were stuck and had to forget about that. Anyway, when we used it, we were able to use SET HOST from VMS and to copy files back and forth with COPY on the VMS side and NFT on the TOPS-10 one, so probably even other DECnet functions such as NML would nicely work. Cheers, :-) G. P.S. SIMH is not a viable choice, because it emulates only a KS10 CPU, while DECnet requires a KL10 CPU for its attached NIA20 Ethernet interface.