Other NOOB questions

[Andrew Barron]

Hi, I have managed to start and use all three operating systems, read files and run games etc. I can also connect via a PuTTY telnet client on my Windows PC.

The excellent document by Lars Brinhoff shows a picture of what is in the ITS distribution. It includes tape drives and hard drives. 

My question is, how do you access these devices? Is there data on hard drives I can't access? Or is everything  I can use already in the space that I can see? 

I was expecting ITS colon or TOPS commands that let you mount tape drives and change hard drives, but they don't seem to be there. I would also like to know if there is a 'system info' file on the simulation, or on the Internet, that explains the devices and capabilities in each of the three operating systems. 

Also what year are the simulations from. i.e. ITS is running on a KA-10 probably from 1968?? Tops-10 is also running on a KA-10. Is it the same computer from the same year? What year and model? 

Tops-20 is running on a KL-10. What year and model?

Thanks!!! Andrew B

[Eric Swenson]

You cannot mount tapes from within ITS. You have to issue the appropriate simulator command to do so. For the pdp10-ka simulator, the SIMH command you will need to issue is:

at mta0 FILENAME

For example

at mta0 foo.tap

Now, in order to get to the simulator prompt, you’ll have to issue the simulator escape character, which, for pdp10-ka is Control-\

That is control-backslash.

You have to type this in the terminal session that is running the simulator. As I’m not a PDPi10 user, but one who runs the simulators directly, I’m not sure how you get to that terminal session. 

Now, once you attach a virtual tape file to the MTA0 device, in ITS, you can access the tape — how you do this is dependent on the tape format. For example, if it is a DUMP tape, you simple issue the :DUMP (or :LOAD) command (they are synonyms). You can use the DUMP ? Command and the info and doc files for help with this command.

You can do raw tape I/O using the MT0: device.

Feel free to ask more questions. Others will probably chime in too.

On Jun 18, 2025, at 19:22, Andrew Barron <zl...@outlook.co.nz> wrote:

Hi, I have managed to start and use all three operating systems, read files and run games etc. I can also connect via a PuTTY telnet client on my Windows PC.

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[Steven A. Falco]

For the PiDP-10, the Raspberry Pi desktop should have a number of icons on the left side of the screen. One of them is labeled SIMH screen. That icon starts a terminal window and will normally be at the "sim>" prompt, but despite the prompt you have to first type ^E (control-E) to get control.

After attaching or detaching a tape, you type "continue" (or just 'c') to resume the simulation. I attached a screenshot; the upper window is for SIMH and the lower window is the ITS console.

Steve

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