On 2023-09-30 00:02, Dave McGuire wrote: That's probably what I'd try. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

I forgot about the management. I assume NML is still there for remote management - Is NCP still there if you can get to a command line? John.

Oh, and for the really twisted part... I have actually played some with XHomer. And I actually can get an XHomer instance up and running hooked to HECnet. However, something have become a bit broken on simh for me faking a serial port. I need to check this up a bit, but I should be able to get BJARNE:: online later today I hope... Johnny On 2023-09-30 16:20, Johnny Billquist wrote: -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

On 2023-09-30 22:23, Paul Koning wrote: I know that there are multiple points/issues with XHomer. But it's the only one that exist, that I know of. And it works well enough to run P/OS. And I've managed to get DECnet working over the serial port. But that's about as much as I've done with it. If someone redo the work on something a bit more appropriate, I would not complain. Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

ARGH! I've finally found a good argument for really kicking that whole ugly mess of pacing serial ports to "fake" the real experience. Turns out it's not as good as it thinks. For normal terminal use, that might be fine, but I'm actually doing something else here... So, as I mentioned, I have this XHomer instance, which I've actually have hooked up to HECnet in the past. Well, as I tried yeasterday, I failed to get it working. The circuit was constantly going down and coming up again. I had a nagging suspicion about the pacing, since it had worked in the past, but I wasn't entirely sure if that was with a simh old enough to not have had that pacing. And looking at communication, I didn't see any huge time issues, so I went and put in loads of debugging in simh, in XHomer, and also on my fake null modem cable between the two instances. After a lot of messing around I was finally sure that the data as such was not corrupted anywhere between the two sides, in either direction. So all data was getting across correctly... However, there was a little bit of funniness I noticed on the timing sometimes. Well, it turns out that the pacing actually is the problem. The DDCMP handling in DECnet have tight enough timing requirements on the serial that the pacing in simh cause timeouts in the DECnet communication. I wasted almost two days on that "feature" that I have hated from day 1. Anyway, if anyone wants to see what a P/OS DECnet node looks like, BJARNE:: is now up and running, and you can talk to it. Johnny On 2023-09-30 16:46, Johnny Billquist wrote: -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

On 2023-10-01 20:29, Paul Koning wrote: Nope. I had long arguments with Mark about it. The best he could offer was a speedup. But yes, I can turn it off. I have the sources after all... And that's what I did. However, I now am re-installing P/OS, since it seems I have forgotten all the passwords I had on that system. *Sigh*. :-) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

On 2023-09-30 16:49, Robert Armstrong wrote: Yes. But none of the added capabilities are used by the PRO. :-( Yes. Other support chips didn't allow things to run at more than 10 MHz. :-( Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

Yes, a J-11 but clocked at 10 MHz. Allegedly it is because the J-11 was originally specified to go up to 20 MHz, and the Pro system control chip assumed that and used a synchronous design for the other clocks. When the J-11 dropped down to 18 MHz, the design couldn't deal with such non-integer ratios and had to drop back all the way to 10 MHz. I have no idea of the merit of that story but it was a rumor I heard around the time that machine arrived. paul

As compared to CP/M and early DOS offerings, and the 8086, we were hugely predisposed to the Pro-350.  The advertising hype certainly helped.  I mean thousands of programs, a modern stable operating system base, a functioning DECnet stack and a reasonable processor ISA.  What's not to love?     Until we started using it an early version on a daily basis... Well, let me rephrase that: _tried_ to use it.  My manager at the time was one of the most fair-minded, even keeled, understated individuals I've ever met—the very soul of mellow patience.  I, on the other hand, being in my mid-20's and of southern Italian extraction was frequently anything but. So one can imagine my shock watching my manager getting /seriously/ bent out of shape, pointing his straight armed finger at the floor and swooping it around backwards, up over his head to come down to push the "Do" button, this accompanied by an increasingly strident, "Do.  DO.  DO! *DO*!!"  when it hung, which was often.  We'd never seen him that annoyed about pretty much anything.  He was more of the sad and disappointed type in that regard when things weren't going his way. So we returned the demonstration unit and looked elsewhere, which I thought was a shame.  I mean, DEC would have had to improve it. I believe another site on CCnet (Stevens) actually required engineering undergraduates to purchase these, so one assumes that they actually put it through its paces and were satisfied. The F11 is not the worst thing in the world as long as you are not locked into it and have a growth and transition path.  What did they do about the addressing?  That would have eventually been a problem.

On 2023-09-30 17:59, Robert Armstrong wrote: Afraid it's going to be more complicated than that. DEC in all it's wisdom decided to make the Pro hardware not really that PDP-11 compatible. So any OS that you want to run on the Pro will need to be rehacked in order to make it possible. Any "normal" RSX will not run on the Pro out of the box. Neither will any other OS. If you want to, I can try start getting into things that need changing. And also reflect a bit on some other parts of the hardware... Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

On 2023-09-30 19:04, Robert Armstrong wrote: No. You can start with that interrupts are handled completely differently to a PDP-11, and this then immediately leads to a console terminal driver will not work on the Pro. Non-interrupt driven communication to the console is the same as a PDP-11, so some diagnostics are possible. But any OS will be interrupt driven, so everything related to interrupts needs to be done differently. And no, nobody have done this. Part of the bigger problem is that the device drivers for the Pro disk controller is not around, so any porting would require rewriting that one, as things stand. Yes. DEC did provide an unsupported version of RT-11. Included drivers that were needed for the Pro. I *think* they also do the console on the graphic subsystem, which again is a bit of work. I *think* Paul also have the never officially released port of RSTS/E for the Pro. But noone did a port of RSX - after all, they had P/OS... Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

On 2023-09-30 19:39, Robert Armstrong wrote: In P/OS, yes. Which is what we don't want to run, wasn't it? ;-) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

"Not really... compatible" is understating things. In fact, it is utterly unrelated to a real PDP-11 except in the CPU. Everything involved in I/O, from the bus to the peripheral devices to the interrupt system, are thoroughly different and in many cases quite messed up. Part of the problem is that the Pro-350 uses a pile of Intel chips, perhaps in an attempt to reduce cost, and as usual for Intel those chips have many bad design features. The interrupt controllers are particularly nasty. It doesn't help that all the I/O devices (except for CNA) are programmed I/O even though I think the bus supports DMA. Doing hard drive I/O one word at a time is ugly, though it turns out the controller is so pathetically slow that the CPU isn't the limitation even with that horrid design. (I found this out when I tried to reduce the interleave on the Pro-380. No go: the standard interleave is the best possible both for the Pro-350 with its F-11 and the -380 with the significantly faster J-11.) paul

On 9/29/23 16:45, Robert Armstrong wrote: Yes, P/OS, but DECnet there is a different animal. Strangely stripped-down and weird. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 9/29/23 18:07, Robert Armstrong wrote: Hahaaaa yes most definitely, but I love it just the same. :-) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

There is a whole bunch of differences. :-) The whole NTINIT is different (it's replaced by something called COMINI), there is no NCP, there is a different FAL, NMF, NMV... There is a NTGNA which is used to fetch nodenames from a remote node. Also (obviously) no NETGEN. If you dig through the sources, there is a lot shared, but P/OS also had a bunch of things that were very Pro-specific. DECnet for MicroRSX on the other hand is very much like DECnet for M+, except it's prebuilt and preconfigured. Johnny On 2023-09-30 16:10, John Forecast wrote: -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

On 9/29/23 20:56, Lee Gleason wrote: Unfortunately not. I did check. (we have a bunch of Pros at LSSM) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA