New PiDP-10 owner 2026 - working great, just have IMLAC issue

[Steve Lewis]

I got my assembled kit a few days ago.   I imaged a new RPi4 for it.

Got most things going (ITS, cscope, Knight TV)

Some initial feedback questions/reactions:

- for cscope bubble program, the cscope window is not resizing (or rather, I can resize the window but the cscope content doesn't scale with it).    I think I've seen it resize in other screenshots, so was curious what I've set wrong there

- the Type 340 window, if I close that, I can't get it back.  I have to pdpcontrol stop then pdpcontrol start 1.  Probably a known issue - just once I closed it by accident and couldn't get it activated again.

- question: if I just drop the microSD card that I've images for this RPi4 over into a RPi5, it should just boot and work as-is?  Or should I re-install onto a RPi5?   I picked the RPi4 since I figured the PDP-10 should be kind of slow/sluggish anyway.   The RPi4 struggles to emulate a login and dual run of cscope bubble and Game of Life at the same time (probably normal).   The other reason I picked the RPi4 is I thought the stereo audio jack might be useful.   Would swapping it over to a RPi5 be worth it/noticed?

- And speaking of that stereo audio out jack on the RPi4, any PDP-10 software that does audio?  I remember the PDP-1 audio demos at CHM.

- Speaking of Game of Life, how do I make it just "go"/run without spacebar?  Or is that too intense since there is no throttle on the step/play speed or when to halt?

- One feedback, in the pre-built order, wish there was an option to go ahead and weld in the 9-pin serial headers.   Without those, I can just tether in a USB/RS232 onto the RPi USB ports and the emulation software will use that?   I have a standalone VT52 terminal (retro device, not original) that I'd like to plug into the RS-232.

- in the telnet window, what are the spurious login/logouts?  I thought that'd be cute to simulate multi-user activity, like random logins with scripted activity that then logout.

e.g.

TARAKA NAMDRG CHANNA _DRGN_ TIMES WRITE

PFTHMG DRAGON CHANA _DRGN_ TIMES WRITE

TARAKA NAMDRG CHANA LOGOUT TIMES

Is it just other maintenence processes?  Sorry if that's already in the manual, hadn't come across it yet.

- Oh, the imlac issue:  when I do ./imlac it says

error while loading shared libraries: libpcre.so.3

I tried do a sudo apt install libpcre3  (or apt-get install), but it said not found.

So looks like I'm just missing a component.  Maybe ya'll are still working on that?

Really respect and appreciate what ya'll have created here, pretty neat to exercise this historic software.   I couldn't get MAZE going yet without the IMLAC, but I'm sure all that's user-error.

-Steve

[Eric Swenson]

Hi Steve.

Glad you got your system setup and working. I’ll let others more familiar with the PiDP-10 answer the questions that pertain to it, but I can address your question regarding these messages:

TARAKA NAMDRG CHANNA _DRGN_ TIMES WRITE

PFTHMG DRAGON CHANA _DRGN_ TIMES WRITE

TARAKA NAMDRG CHANA LOGOUT TIMES

The terminal window you are looking at is the ITS operator console, which is T00. You will see occasional messages regarding LOGINS, but also messages deemed important from the system job (SYSJOB) displayed on T00 as well. The three messages above are indications that jobs are writing to files in system directories. 

The first message says that the TARAKA daemon wrote to the file CHANNA;_DRGN_ TIMES. The second says that the FFTHMG daemon did the same.

The thirds says that TARAKA wrote to CHANNA;LOGOUT TIMES.

You must have typed in those messages manually because you had some typos.  The last messages on my operator console are:

PFTHMG DRAGON CHANNA _DRGN_ TIMES  WRITE  07:51:15

PFTHMG DRAGON CHANNA LOGOUT TIMES  DELRNM 07:51:15

IT IS NOW  7:51:48 AM PDT, WEDNESDAY, APR 15, 2026

 LOGIN  12TLNT 0 466735 07:54:04

 LOGIN  EJS0   12 07:54:15

The second one shows that a file was renamed (CHANNA;_DRGN_ TIMES => CHANNA; LOGOUT TIMES).  

The second message is a periodic time stamp.

The third shows that someone telneted to my system, and the next one shows that it was a second instance of me who did that, because I logged in.

There are other kinds of messages that show up here too. 

— Eric

On Apr 14, 2026, at 20:31, Steve Lewis <contact....@gmail.com> wrote:

I got my assembled kit a few days ago.   I imaged a new RPi4 for it.

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[Steve Lewis]

Thanks,  I figured they were mostly benign system messages, since there did seem to be a kind of pattern to them and not sporadic.   But I did want to make sure something wasn't already probing into the system externally.   I'm not up to speed on what any changes the PiDP-10 installer stuff does (for ports and firewall and such).

And yes, I just transcribed a few messages as reference examples.  Sorry for not being more precise.  I thought maybe one of them might be like a print spooler, polling for jobs once in a while?

A simulated-multi-user module might be interesting -  simulated parallel terminal sessions, maybe one emacs a file, saves, then deletes it.  I'd call it the "wilson" login (after the volleyball in Cast Away).

Well, are there tape (9-track?) or disk pack visual models?  Like when we type "ITS", I assume in the past that translated into some movement on a tape to kick off the seek and load?  Would be neat to visualize things like "when I do this action, it causes this {virtual} tape over here to twitch."  For disk packs, there could just be an activity light.

But getting ahead of myself - still much to explore first, and start collecting command sequence notes :)

-Steve

[Eric Swenson]

You could do your own multi-user simulation — just fire off a few host shells to connect to ITS with telnet, log in (to different accounts) and issue a bunch of ITS commands.

When you type ITS (at DSKDMP to boot Multics) you are reading the ITS image from a file in the root directory of the ITS disk. No tapes involved there. Similarly when you type commands to ITS, they are loaded from files in the file system and executed. There are simulated tape drives and you can use, for example, the DUMP and LOAD (alias to DUMP) programs to write and read tapes. 

There is an MT0: device that allows direct access to a mounted tape, and DSKn: devices to access disks.

But I guess you’re interested in visualizations of tape/disk/other device activities. One would probably have to make emulator changes to provide hooks for those.

On Apr 15, 2026, at 10:34, Steve Lewis <contact....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks,  I figured they were mostly benign system messages, since there did seem to be a kind of pattern to them and not sporadic.   But I did want to make sure something wasn't already probing into the system externally.   I'm not up to speed on what any changes the PiDP-10 installer stuff does (for ports and firewall and such).

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