[Hecky Beckenbauer]

Hi,
I am new to the pidp11.
I was lurking a bit .

My background:
When I was a freshly graduated engineer, I worked for a brief time with a VAX and VMS .
We transferred quickly to SUN Sparc and I was a sysadmin for the first Ultra Sparc in the company.

On the Sparc the UNIX variant was called Solaris.
I still have a install CD for Solaris 1.1.2 :-)

When I fired pidp11 unix6 up and worked me into it, I remembered a lot of the pain in those days.
Well not really pain, we did not know better but in retrospect .
Using ED as an editor for example. And this very basic BASH.

We where forced to work as root all the time because “sudo” was not existing. ( “SU” was of course)
I have a nice story about a mishap with “rm . “ instead of “rm ./“ . MY most stress-full 2 hours of my professional life up to day .
I did this on a production driving Sparc. Literally tens of million dollars on the line. (Not to speak about my career) .


I never used ED but i wrote my first pascal programs with EDLIN ( rings a bell?)

When I was working on the old UNIX systems I used VI and use it up today . Love this piece of software for sysadmin work.
I sneeze on emacs or any other editors for UNIX/Linux :-)

Why? VI is so easy and can handle enormous files. It is also super quick and it is available on any UNIX system even with the most rudimentary install.

Well that should do it for an introduction :-)

Are there also guys on this mail list interested in the software ?

I am particular interested how to get files on and off the pidp11 for unix6 .
Any good way to do that ?
Can I open a serial port and do any kind of kermit? Is this available for unix6 ?

BTW
I use my Apple III with XModem software to log into the pidp11 unix6 .
My Apple II can also connect with Kermit and other protocols.
Of course i can also ssh from my PC/Mac over wifi :-( (not preferred)

[Johnny Billquist]

First of all, welcome. :-)

On 2022-05-15 18:32, Hecky Beckenbauer wrote:
> Hi,
> I am new to the pidp11.
> I was lurking a bit .
>
> My background:
> When I was a freshly graduated engineer, I worked for a brief time with a VAX and VMS .
> We transferred quickly to SUN Sparc and I was a sysadmin for the first Ultra Sparc in the company.
>
> On the Sparc the UNIX variant was called Solaris.
> I still have a install CD for Solaris 1.1.2 :-)
>
> When I fired pidp11 unix6 up and worked me into it, I remembered a lot of the pain in those days.
> Well not really pain, we did not know better but in retrospect .

There is definitely some pain in using some of the old tools...

> Using ED as an editor for example. And this very basic BASH.

Nitpicking a bit, there is no "basic BASH". You are talking about SH.
Check what BASH is an acronym for. ;-)

> We where forced to work as root all the time because “sudo” was not existing. ( “SU” was of course)

Well. It's not that you can't do whatever you need as yourself, and just
do su when you need to do something as root. Yes, it's not a single line
command, but it's not really that much more complicated.

> I never used ED but i wrote my first pascal programs with EDLIN ( rings a bell?)

Isn't that MSDOS?

> When I was working on the old UNIX systems I used VI and use it up today . Love this piece of software for sysadmin work.
> I sneeze on emacs or any other editors for UNIX/Linux :-)
>
> Why? VI is so easy and can handle enormous files. It is also super quick and it is available on any UNIX system even with the most rudimentary install.

Well, vi on 2.11BSD certainly have a limit which much much smaller than
"enormous". I would expect that to also be true on v6. Sounds like you
might be a little too used to vim, which is not the same as vi? ;-)

> Well that should do it for an introduction :-)
>
> Are there also guys on this mail list interested in the software ?
>
> I am particular interested how to get files on and off the pidp11 for unix6 .
> Any good way to do that ?
> Can I open a serial port and do any kind of kermit? Is this available for unix6 ?
>
> BTW
> I use my Apple III with XModem software to log into the pidp11 unix6 .
> My Apple II can also connect with Kermit and other protocols.
> Of course i can also ssh from my PC/Mac over wifi :-( (not preferred)

Afraid I don't have much experience with v6. With 2.11BSD, I usually use
ftp, but kermit is also available...

Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

[Clem Cole]

below...

On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 12:32 PM Hecky Beckenbauer <heckybecke...@gmail.com> wrote:

Using ED as an editor for example. And this very basic BASH.

Ouch .. points off for historical rewriting ....   Serious and no offense intended, your message shows that you seem to have missed some large parts of UNIX history and thus may have been led astray.

The UNIX shell that Steve Bourne developed and released in UNIX/TS and Seventh Research Ediot (a.k.a. the Bourne shell or simple /bin/sh) and later Joy's cshell beget gnu bash. Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth edition has a /bin/sh but it is the Thompson shell and the only relation it has is the precursor to cshell was Joy's Berkeley in {1}BSD which he started hacking on i.e. he extended the Thompson shell to create the shell in BSD, then did more hacking and created the new cshell, which he released on the original 2BSD tape.

The point is Bourne Shell, not Bash is root of things.

As we used to say in the old days ... Bourne to Program, Type with Joy.

Note Steve wrote his shell on a Research v6 system that was in the process of becoming the new UNIX/TS kernel and what would get released as the kernel in the Research Seventh Edition.  I have personally not tried backporting the V7 released version of the Bourne Shell to v6, but they do exist (IIR I recall Noel has one in his archives of the MIT UNIX systems).   If you do try to backport, there are going to be at least two issues.  The code itself is written in Steve's infamous 'BourneGOL' macros, and at the time of his writing it, Dennis' C compiler was in transition.  That new compiler is usually referred to as 'Typesetter C,' as it was being developed for BWK's ditroff work.   Steve may have used facilities from the new compiler.  If so, you'll need to either find a copy of typesetter C (which is the version of C that is described in K&R and has its libS.a  - i.e. v6 kernel), or ensure none of the newer language features are used.  I frankly don't remember, Noel is the better keeper of PWB 1.0 history, than I; but I >>think<< John Mashey (one of PWB's main parents)  released PWB 1.0 with the Typesetter compiler stream.

We where forced to work as root all the time because “sudo” was not existing. ( “SU” was of course)

As did many of sudo's precursors, the 'priv' command was probably the most popular in those days. There is a copy on a mid-late 70s GA Tech tape and I think on a USENIX tape.   FWIW: these days, I actually have an alias of priv to sudo since I have been using it for 45+ years.  @. UCB we had other tricks that used cshell macros, which I'll not describe.  The biggest feature sudo did over priv, was starting to keep a log of what way being typed, so you could know who blame when bad things happened.

But the point is, it was well know in the early-modf 1970s that smart people working as a sys admin would never work as root for more than a command or two.  That why ken wrote su(1).  su for a command or two fix what you needed, drop back to being mortal.  priv and sudo just make this a tad easier and started adding some protection as to who could run it and what could be done.   But they are >>old<< commands.

 

I never used ED

Ouch ... Please get a copy of Kernighan Pike's  'The Unix Programming Environment (TUPE) and start doing the exercises.  Learning ed(1) (and *roff to be honest) is important - even today.  You will not properly learn to use grep (the g-Global / r-Regular e=Expression / p-Print  command from ed or sed, or a number of other tools including vi itself.  Remember Vi is the VIsual command to UCB'ed extensions to V6's ed - called ex.  The point is doing the exercises in TUPE will put you on a level footing for any and all UNIX versions.  So much of the mystery and miss confusion we have is because people just never learned the details.

I describe this a little like why we teach sentence structure to 1st and 2nd graders.   No one will diagram a sentence in real life. But once they understand how the language is put together, they become better writers later.

Bottom line it's not a waste of time to know how to use ed(1) and troff(1) -- you will be surprised what will started to be revealed as to why things work as they do.

... end sermon ...

 

but i wrote my first pascal programs with EDLIN ( rings a bell?)

EDLIN came from Microsoft for PC/MS-DOS.  I'm a pretty long time (old) UNIX hacker, I know of no one that ever bothered to write a version of it for UNIX. I know a lot the UNIX editors's moved to DOS not the other way round.  If you do, I'd be curious about it. I did once hear that FreeDOS folks cloned it in C but I have never seen the code nor have any idea if it will work anywhere other than FreeDOS..

When I was working on the old UNIX systems I used VI and use it up today.

Actually versions of vi ran on everything from the Cray systems to a PC I had access to in those days.  Very handy piece of SW.  EMACS could not do that.  Eventually when microprocessors had enough address space and memory EMACS moved.

FWIW: If you grab the 2BSD distribution from archive TUHS.org, ex/vi might compile on v6.  You might have to install the original BSD stuff first. Joy wrote the original on the Cory Hall V6 system and only upgraded it to V7 in late 1979 after V7 came to UCB.  Same issues I mentioned WRT Bourne shell being developed on Sixth Edition.

You can also poke around anything that is PWB 1.0 based.  I'm going to lie a little, but for these purposes its true enough, PWB 1.0 was (mostly) based on a V6 kernel and most things just recompile if not work binary to binary.

FWIW:  Webb Miller's vi 'clone' called s from his Software Tools Book, compiles and runs on everything from 8 bit CP/M machines to modern.  It recompiled out of the box on Seventh edition, which is what is running on my own PiDP-11.  Since it works on an 8-bit machine too with old and much similplier compilers, it might just compile on Fifth or Sixth edition without too much work.   The issue is you must use it with a full ANSI based terminal (like XTERM or the PC/ANSI mode from DOS) - are know to work, but some DEC "VT-100" emulators are known to burp on this code.  It works fine on H19 and Wyse60, but I no longer have access a real DEC terminal so I can not tell you if that will work   i.e. YMMV .... 

Are there also guys on this mail list interested in the software ?

I'm not sure what you mean by this...  

I am particular interested how to get files on and off the pidp11 for unix6 .
Any good way to do that ?

There are numerous solutions.  IMO the easiest is to ensure you have all 8 RK05 disks configured on your copy of v6 and the proper mknod entries in /dev for each.

Then either find a modern copy of tp(1) [not hard, but the tape image format has a number of limits], or put a binary copy of Ken's v6tar on your eumlated V6 so you can read and write tar images there. The original tp(1) program Ken wrote in PDP-11 assembler, but a number of replacement tp's came along  in hte community -- with stp(1) from Harvard being the most used before Ken released tar with V7.

So on my mac, I type: tar cvf some_file_for_output file1 ... dir1 .... etc..

Then in the boot.ini, attach some_file_for_output as the 'disk' for the RK05 n [I tend to use 7 for transfers]

then on you emulated V6 you can type:  v6tar xvf /dev/rrk0X   and you will see the files.

Writing works in reverse...

exercise for the reader ... how will you get v6tar over there in the first place - hint dd(1) if your friend.

Obvious, The V6 tp programs works the same way, but you'll need a modern copy of tp(1) for your Mac to write the images for simh.

 

Can I open a serial port and do any kind of kermit? Is this available for unix6 ?

Yes there are versions of kermit and other tools in the wild.  I find them slow and awkward, and you add a level indirection/confusion WRT the terminal handlers that I have watched too many people get sucked down rat holes from numerous different places where misunderstanding can come - the RS-232 interface vs USB, different virtual UART vs local UART issues, tty handlers on both the host and emulator side. The point is that chasm is deep and there are a lot of strange beast at bottom, so the learning curve can be long.

The shared disk scheme is pretty easy once you get used to how simh works from a mechanics standpoint (when the stop the simulation, switch virtual disks etcs).  Just understand that virtual disk in simh is a linear array of 512 byte blocks.   It will read or create data in that format.   The simh driver will limit the size of the 'virtual file' to be the size of the disk.   An RK05 gives you a whopping 4872 blocks (2494464 bytes) but for most transfers this is plenty since you don't have much storage on your virtual system disk anyway.

BTW:  simh of course supports emulated tapes.  That will work also but you'll need to convert the files from bytes to the *.tap format described in the simh documentation.  This of course removes the file size constraints, since virtual tapes can be of any size.  Frankly, I think its an extra step and I don't have a problem reserving a virtual disk as my common I/O device..

BTW
I use my Apple III with XModem software to log into the pidp11 unix6 .
My Apple II can also connect with Kermit and other protocols.

Issue will be the terminal handler/emulator.  I have no idea how good the  kermit terminal functions are.  If they are full ansi, you should be fine.

 

Of course i can also ssh from my PC/Mac over wifi :-( (not preferred)

Many of us use real 1G wired ethernet and then run a VNC server on the PC and VNC client on the Mac 

It means you are getting a xterm and full cut/paste which is handy.  The emulated system can be fairly stripped compared to today's system and you need fewer resources on it to support it.  simh is doing most of the hard work on the emulated side.

BTW: one thing I often do is, I keep a copy of the emulated system on my Mac,  I do all the transfers and set things up using sinh locally. Then once I have a disk I like, I move the emulated disk over to the PiDP-11.  I have way more tools on the my mac than on the PI.

But if you do that .... make sure you get a fairly current version of simh from Mark's github.  He pulled a number of serial fixes for simh from me earlier this winter that are needed for more modern UNIX systems, and in particular macOS.   

ᐧ

[Hecky Beckenbauer]

> On May 15, 2022, at 11:58 AM, Johnny Billquist <b...@softjar.se> wrote:
>
> First of all, welcome. :-)
>
> On 2022-05-15 18:32, Hecky Beckenbauer wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I am new to the pidp11.
>> I was lurking a bit .
>> My background:
>> When I was a freshly graduated engineer, I worked for a brief time with a VAX and VMS .
>> We transferred quickly to SUN Sparc and I was a sysadmin for the first Ultra Sparc in the company.
>> On the Sparc the UNIX variant was called Solaris.
>> I still have a install CD for Solaris 1.1.2 :-)
>> When I fired pidp11 unix6 up and worked me into it, I remembered a lot of the pain in those days.
>> Well not really pain, we did not know better but in retrospect .
>
> There is definitely some pain in using some of the old tools...
>
>> Using ED as an editor for example. And this very basic BASH.
>
> Nitpicking a bit, there is no "basic BASH". You are talking about SH. Check what BASH is an acronym for. ;-)

You are right and I was wrongly speaking. I remember how much fanfare it was to have the tcsh and how my boss did dissed me for using it .( he was a purist)

>
>> We where forced to work as root all the time because “sudo” was not existing. ( “SU” was of course)
>
> Well. It's not that you can't do whatever you need as yourself, and just do su when you need to do something as root. Yes, it's not a single line command, but it's not really that much more complicated.

Well with all the time I meant to "su root" all the time. Of course you did that only if absolutely needed. However it was needed all the time :-)
Nobody was a computer scientist, we had all different backgrounds .
I am a physicist and back then I did double duty as sysadmin and research engineer.

>
>> I never used ED but i wrote my first pascal programs with EDLIN ( rings a bell?)
>
> Isn't that MSDOS?

Correct, when I was at the university and had to learn USCD Pascal on the then brand new IBM PC and then the super duper IBM XT’s.Shortly after even the IBM AT’s with a hard drive !
IBM had a close mentorship with our university.
I remember when I graduated, a guy from IBM came to us , threw a stack of paper on the desk and told us to sign the work contracts, he would hire us all on the spot.
Many guys did it and worked on the first mega bit chips .

>
>> When I was working on the old UNIX systems I used VI and use it up today . Love this piece of software for sysadmin work.
>> I sneeze on emacs or any other editors for UNIX/Linux :-)
>> Why? VI is so easy and can handle enormous files. It is also super quick and it is available on any UNIX system even with the most rudimentary install.
>
> Well, vi on 2.11BSD certainly have a limit which much much smaller than "enormous". I would expect that to also be true on v6. Sounds like you might be a little too used to vim, which is not the same as vi? ;-)

I don’t think VIM was existing back then , and production data was enormous in size for the time when your average hard drive was in the MB range .
I still remember how enormous these full size HD drives where and the sound they made when they spin up during power up.

Still in the time before I retired VI was good enough to handle those data-packages and a search with VI was much faster on the databank than firing up any fancy editor.
Now come on and challenge me with ‘grep’ and how much better it is for that task :-)

There was more to it but anyway a different story.

>
>> Well that should do it for an introduction :-)
>> Are there also guys on this mail list interested in the software ?
>> I am particular interested how to get files on and off the pidp11 for unix6 .
>> Any good way to do that ?
>> Can I open a serial port and do any kind of kermit? Is this available for unix6 ?
>> BTW
>> I use my Apple III with XModem software to log into the pidp11 unix6 .
>> My Apple II can also connect with Kermit and other protocols.
>> Of course i can also ssh from my PC/Mac over wifi :-( (not preferred)
>

> Afraid I don't have much experience with v6. With 2.11BSD, I usually use ftp, but kermit is also available…

FTP on unix6 would be OK with me but I am not aware if it is available .

>
> Johnny
>
> --
> Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
> || on a psychedelic trip
> email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
> pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "[PiDP-11]" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pidp-11+u...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-11/6c27c458-ed73-ee8d-17e6-00dd6b0f961b%40softjar.se.

[Hecky Beckenbauer]

below :-) 

On May 15, 2022, at 12:32 PM, Clem Cole <cl...@ccc.com> wrote:

below...

On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 12:32 PM Hecky Beckenbauer <heckybecke...@gmail.com> wrote:

Using ED as an editor for example. And this very basic BASH.

Ouch .. points off for historical rewriting ....   Serious and no offense intended, your message shows that you seem to have missed some large parts of UNIX history and thus may have been led astray.

The UNIX shell that Steve Bourne developed and released in UNIX/TS and Seventh Research Ediot (a.k.a. the Bourne shell or simple /bin/sh) and later Joy's cshell beget gnu bash. Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth edition has a /bin/sh but it is the Thompson shell and the only relation it has is the precursor to cshell was Joy's Berkeley in {1}BSD which he started hacking on i.e. he extended the Thompson shell to create the shell in BSD, then did more hacking and created the new cshell, which he released on the original 2BSD tape.

The point is Bourne Shell, not Bash is root of things.

I misspoke the bash, sorry for that.No bash .

I had thought I dropped all the memories of the early unix system out of my brain.

But when I fired up the pidp11 software on the raspberry with unix6 running some came back and tingled  my brain the right way.

Still i guess I will have some mixups about what was when .

As we used to say in the old days ... Bourne to Program, Type with Joy.

Note Steve wrote his shell on a Research v6 system that was in the process of becoming the new UNIX/TS kernel and what would get released as the kernel in the Research Seventh Edition.  I have personally not tried backporting the V7 released version of the Bourne Shell to v6, but they do exist (IIR I recall Noel has one in his archives of the MIT UNIX systems).   If you do try to backport, there are going to be at least two issues.  The code itself is written in Steve's infamous 'BourneGOL' macros, and at the time of his writing it, Dennis' C compiler was in transition.  That new compiler is usually referred to as 'Typesetter C,' as it was being developed for BWK's ditroff work.   Steve may have used facilities from the new compiler.  If so, you'll need to either find a copy of typesetter C (which is the version of C that is described in K&R and has its libS.a  - i.e. v6 kernel), or ensure none of the newer language features are used.  I frankly don't remember, Noel is the better keeper of PWB 1.0 history, than I; but I >>think<< John Mashey (one of PWB's main parents)  released PWB 1.0 with the Typesetter compiler stream.

We where forced to work as root all the time because “sudo” was not existing. ( “SU” was of course)

As did many of sudo's precursors, the 'priv' command was probably the most popular in those days. There is a copy on a mid-late 70s GA Tech tape and I think on a USENIX tape.   FWIW: these days, I actually have an alias of priv to sudo since I have been using it for 45+ years.  @. UCB we had other tricks that used cshell macros, which I'll not describe.  The biggest feature sudo did over priv, was starting to keep a log of what way being typed, so you could know who blame when bad things happened.

But the point is, it was well know in the early-modf 1970s that smart people working as a sys admin would never work as root for more than a command or two.  That why ken wrote su(1).  su for a command or two fix what you needed, drop back to being mortal.  priv and sudo just make this a tad easier and started adding some protection as to who could run it and what could be done.   But they are >>old<< commands.

 

I never used ED

Ouch ... Please get a copy of Kernighan Pike's  'The Unix Programming Environment (TUPE) and start doing the exercises.  Learning ed(1) (and *roff to be honest) is important - even today.  You will not properly learn to use grep (the g-Global / r-Regular e=Expression / p-Print  command from ed or sed, or a number of other tools including vi itself.  Remember Vi is the VIsual command to UCB'ed extensions to V6's ed - called ex.  The point is doing the exercises in TUPE will put you on a level footing for any and all UNIX versions.  So much of the mystery and miss confusion we have is because people just never learned the details.

I describe this a little like why we teach sentence structure to 1st and 2nd graders.   No one will diagram a sentence in real life. But once they understand how the language is put together, they become better writers later.

Bottom line it's not a waste of time to know how to use ed(1) and troff(1) -- you will be surprised what will started to be revealed as to why things work as they do.

... end sermon …

I never used ED because I had never use to it . For the editor I used VI , grep, troff, awk and all that was used in addition.

I feel I managed all tasks with those quite well even without using ED.

I wrote a whole software package mainly driven by shell script, AWK and perl .Using only VI as an editor.

It ran for years for a well know semiconductor manufactor in Texas ( you know who) and was used for  semiconductor development . I later even had a web interface added to it.

It turned a 40% failure rate below 5% .

If you know anything about semiconductor production, this is a huge cost improvement.

 

but i wrote my first pascal programs with EDLIN ( rings a bell?)

EDLIN came from Microsoft for PC/MS-DOS.  I'm a pretty long time (old) UNIX hacker, I know of no one that ever bothered to write a version of it for UNIX. I know a lot the UNIX editors's moved to DOS not the other way round.  If you do, I'd be curious about it. I did once hear that FreeDOS folks cloned it in C but I have never seen the code nor have any idea if it will work anywhere other than FreeDOS..

My worst programming memory is closely related to be forced to use EDLIN. It was a pure horror and I am still convinced my computer science professor was a sadist.

When I was working on the old UNIX systems I used VI and use it up today.

Actually versions of vi ran on everything from the Cray systems to a PC I had access to in those days.  Very handy piece of SW.  EMACS could not do that.  Eventually when microprocessors had enough address space and memory EMACS moved.

FWIW: If you grab the 2BSD distribution from archive TUHS.org, ex/vi might compile on v6.  You might have to install the original BSD stuff first. Joy wrote the original on the Cory Hall V6 system and only upgraded it to V7 in late 1979 after V7 came to UCB.  Same issues I mentioned WRT Bourne shell being developed on Sixth Edition.

Well that is interesting.

However I checked the sourceforge repository for ex/vi .

Unix6 will not be ready to compile it from what I have seen on first glance .

Anyhow I will work a bit into the details .

You can also poke around anything that is PWB 1.0 based.  I'm going to lie a little, but for these purposes its true enough, PWB 1.0 was (mostly) based on a V6 kernel and most things just recompile if not work binary to binary.

FWIW:  Webb Miller's vi 'clone' called s from his Software Tools Book, compiles and runs on everything from 8 bit CP/M machines to modern.  It recompiled out of the box on Seventh edition, which is what is running on my own PiDP-11.  Since it works on an 8-bit machine too with old and much similplier compilers, it might just compile on Fifth or Sixth edition without too much work.   The issue is you must use it with a full ANSI based terminal (like XTERM or the PC/ANSI mode from DOS) - are know to work, but some DEC "VT-100" emulators are known to burp on this code.  It works fine on H19 and Wyse60, but I no longer have access a real DEC terminal so I can not tell you if that will work   i.e. YMMV .... 

Are there also guys on this mail list interested in the software ?

I'm not sure what you mean by this…  

From lurking for a while on this mail-list I got the impression most people are more interested in adding a case to the pidp11 and less of using the simulator .

Just my first impression that’s why i was asking .

I am particular interested how to get files on and off the pidp11 for unix6 .
Any good way to do that ?

There are numerous solutions.  IMO the easiest is to ensure you have all 8 RK05 disks configured on your copy of v6 and the proper mknod entries in /dev for each.

Then either find a modern copy of tp(1) [not hard, but the tape image format has a number of limits], or put a binary copy of Ken's v6tar on your eumlated V6 so you can read and write tar images there. The original tp(1) program Ken wrote in PDP-11 assembler, but a number of replacement tp's came along  in hte community -- with stp(1) from Harvard being the most used before Ken released tar with V7.

So on my mac, I type: tar cvf some_file_for_output file1 ... dir1 .... etc..

Then in the boot.ini, attach some_file_for_output as the 'disk' for the RK05 n [I tend to use 7 for transfers]

then on you emulated V6 you can type:  v6tar xvf /dev/rrk0X   and you will see the files.

Writing works in reverse...

exercise for the reader ... how will you get v6tar over there in the first place - hint dd(1) if your friend.

Obvious, The V6 tp programs works the same way, but you'll need a modern copy of tp(1) for your Mac to write the images for simh.

that is a good input, thanks.

Something which points me into a working direction.

I will look into that .

 

Can I open a serial port and do any kind of kermit? Is this available for unix6 ?

Yes there are versions of kermit and other tools in the wild.  I find them slow and awkward, and you add a level indirection/confusion WRT the terminal handlers that I have watched too many people get sucked down rat holes from numerous different places where misunderstanding can come - the RS-232 interface vs USB, different virtual UART vs local UART issues, tty handlers on both the host and emulator side. The point is that chasm is deep and there are a lot of strange beast at bottom, so the learning curve can be long.

The shared disk scheme is pretty easy once you get used to how simh works from a mechanics standpoint (when the stop the simulation, switch virtual disks etcs).  Just understand that virtual disk in simh is a linear array of 512 byte blocks.   It will read or create data in that format.   The simh driver will limit the size of the 'virtual file' to be the size of the disk.   An RK05 gives you a whopping 4872 blocks (2494464 bytes) but for most transfers this is plenty since you don't have much storage on your virtual system disk anyway.

BTW:  simh of course supports emulated tapes.  That will work also but you'll need to convert the files from bytes to the *.tap format described in the simh documentation.  This of course removes the file size constraints, since virtual tapes can be of any size.  Frankly, I think its an extra step and I don't have a problem reserving a virtual disk as my common I/O device..

BTW
I use my Apple III with XModem software to log into the pidp11 unix6 .
My Apple II can also connect with Kermit and other protocols.

Issue will be the terminal handler/emulator.  I have no idea how good the  kermit terminal functions are.  If they are full ansi, you should be fine.

I am not insisting on Kermit , I know it from my days when I was using HP48 calculators which had a serial port and you could transfer programs to a PC/Mac with the kermit protocol 

Very basic but would work, thats why I was mention it .

 

Of course i can also ssh from my PC/Mac over wifi :-( (not preferred)

Many of us use real 1G wired ethernet and then run a VNC server on the PC and VNC client on the Mac 

what different does it make if I VNC via wifi or ethernet ?

I can connect the Raspberry to my Ethernet network ,as all my Mac’s are 9Even my Apple II is on the etherent) 

It means you are getting a xterm and full cut/paste which is handy.  The emulated system can be fairly stripped compared to today's system and you need fewer resources on it to support it.  simh is doing most of the hard work on the emulated side.

I may misunderstand this but I still need a terminal window running the simH simulating the PDP11, right ?

See copy and paste is not working so smoothly when you have only ED as editor.

ED needs special treatment of “#” and “$” as it expect the line to be “ \# define bufsize 512 “ instead of the way you would write in VI “ # define bufsize 512 “

So a simple copy paste will render a good part of your source code unusable and you need to do a lot of search and replace in ED to correct it.

Guess how I found out :-) 

[Clem Cole]

below... -- after editing...

On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 9:01 PM Hecky Beckenbauer <heckybecke...@gmail.com> wrote:

From lurking for a while on this mail-list I got the impression most people are more interested in adding a case to the pidp11 and less of using the simulator . Just my first impression that’s why i was asking .

There are two other lists that more appropriate.

simh itself and if you are interested in UNIX things TUHS.

 

that is a good input, thanks.

Something which points me into a working direction.

I will look into that .

If you can not find v6tar easily (binary can be found in both TUHS and Noel's archives - that later is probably quicker, let me know off list I;ll get you a copy of it.

I am not insisting on Kermit , I know it from my days when I was using HP48 calculators which had a serial port and you could transfer programs to a PC/Mac with the kermit protocol 

Very basic but would work, thats why I was mention it .

It's not Kermit and any tool -- you just have extra levels of emulation and lots of places to trip up.  If you just want a reliable transfer, the disk is easier.   On the mac, I often run a different simulator that has a shared virtual disk between the emulated system and the local system.   With the PiDP-11 you don't have that option.  Folks have talked of doing something like that for simh, but so far most folks have worked on enhancing in other places.   Read -- opportunity awaits...   

 

Of course i can also ssh from my PC/Mac over wifi :-( (not preferred)

Many of us use real 1G wired ethernet and then run a VNC server on the PC and VNC client on the Mac 

what different does it make if I VNC via wifi or ethernet ?

I can connect the Raspberry to my Ethernet network ,as all my Mac’s are 9Even my Apple II is on the etherent) 

Unfortunately, WiFi != Hardwire Ethernet.  When simh and the emulated system try to run, those differences are acute.  I'll not go into the issues here [read the simh mailing archives if you want the details].   You can make it work, but ethernet wire is cheap and many/most RPi's have ethernet options.  I run my PiDP-11 on an original Zero with a POE ethernet to power it all from my 48 port Cisco switch.   Meaning to switch the PiDP-8 to that set up also, but so far have not.

It means you are getting a xterm and full cut/paste which is handy.  The emulated system can be fairly stripped compared to today's system and you need fewer resources on it to support it.  simh is doing most of the hard work on the emulated side.

I may misunderstand this but I still need a terminal window running the simH simulating the PDP11, right ?

Well, you need at least a console and possibly a connection to a second DL-11 port.  IIRC Ken's default V6 configure you may need to change a parameter, but frankly, I have forgotten.

I have configured simh to set up the virtual serial ports on TCP connections.  I can connect to them from the Mac or from an xterm on the PI using VNC.

See copy and paste is not working so smoothly when you have only ED as editor.

FYI - I do it all the time with both v6 and v7.

I suspect your configuration is either somehow different than mine in some way or more probably your expectations maybe is a tad different.

The way tty characters and how that is handled are independent of cut/paste.  There are differences in the tty handlers between v6 and v7

and the modes that ex/vi run compared to ed.  

Again I tend to mess with a V7 system with a few small tty mods to make more modern typing a tad more convenient - which we actually developed in the late 1970s.  I believe Noel has similar hacks in his V6/PWB mashup from MIT.  It all depends on what you want to do/what your expectations are.  Even on V7 back in the day, we had glass TTYs like PE Foxes, Tek 4025, LSI ADM3As, H19s, and AAAs -- so even then we wanted proper backspace operation and preferred ^U to @ for line kill.  Those changes are all very small and given we wrote them for V7 (on V7) years ago, I don't have a problem with using them today.

Again it's how far to do want to go...   if you want a UNIX closer to the most modern running a PiDP-11, then a version BSD 2.11 which will give you networking.  The PiDP-11 runs it just fine -and will boot to it].  Frankly, given that will provide you networking to/from the emulated host, you might find that more comfortable.

That's not mine.  I desire to use the system pretty much as a way configured in those days to test things I have long forgotten, reexamination of things we did, often with some level of nostalgia - we did an awful lot with very little.   I want a small level of comfort.  I've meant to install a few things from the original 2BSD tape like I had at CMU and on the Teklab's machines in those days.  Frankly, have not bothered.  I have a couple of old tools and as I said, I run Webb's s on my v7 system instead of vi - which is good enough. 

YMMV  ...  

ᐧ

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, May 15, 2022, 7:43 PM Clem Cole <cl...@ccc.com> wrote:

below... -- after editing...

On Sun, May 15, 2022 at 9:01 PM Hecky Beckenbauer <heckybecke...@gmail.com> wrote:

From lurking for a while on this mail-list I got the impression most people are more interested in adding a case to the pidp11 and less of using the simulator . Just my first impression that’s why i was asking .

There are two other lists that more appropriate.

simh itself and if you are interested in UNIX things TUHS.

 

that is a good input, thanks.

Something which points me into a working direction.

I will look into that .

If you can not find v6tar easily (binary can be found in both TUHS and Noel's archives - that later is probably quicker, let me know off list I;ll get you a copy of it.

I am not insisting on Kermit , I know it from my days when I was using HP48 calculators which had a serial port and you could transfer programs to a PC/Mac with the kermit protocol 

Very basic but would work, thats why I was mention it .

It's not Kermit and any tool -- you just have extra levels of emulation and lots of places to trip up.  If you just want a reliable transfer, the disk is easier.   On the mac, I often run a different simulator that has a shared virtual disk between the emulated system and the local system.   With the PiDP-11 you don't have that option.  Folks have talked of doing something like that for simh, but so far most folks have worked on enhancing in other places.   Read -- opportunity awaits...   

If I'm using a simulation, I skip kermit, et al, and just make a tarball and mount it as a tape... I used that technique a lot with the 2.11 restoration work I did that I need to finish...

Warner 

 

Of course i can also ssh from my PC/Mac over wifi :-( (not preferred)

Many of us use real 1G wired ethernet and then run a VNC server on the PC and VNC client on the Mac 

what different does it make if I VNC via wifi or ethernet ?

I can connect the Raspberry to my Ethernet network ,as all my Mac’s are 9Even my Apple II is on the etherent) 

Unfortunately, WiFi != Hardwire Ethernet.  When simh and the emulated system try to run, those differences are acute.  I'll not go into the issues here [read the simh mailing archives if you want the details].   You can make it work, but ethernet wire is cheap and many/most RPi's have ethernet options.  I run my PiDP-11 on an original Zero with a POE ethernet to power it all from my 48 port Cisco switch.   Meaning to switch the PiDP-8 to that set up also, but so far have not.

It means you are getting a xterm and full cut/paste which is handy.  The emulated system can be fairly stripped compared to today's system and you need fewer resources on it to support it.  simh is doing most of the hard work on the emulated side.

I may misunderstand this but I still need a terminal window running the simH simulating the PDP11, right ?

Well, you need at least a console and possibly a connection to a second DL-11 port.  IIRC Ken's default V6 configure you may need to change a parameter, but frankly, I have forgotten.

I have configured simh to set up the virtual serial ports on TCP connections.  I can connect to them from the Mac or from an xterm on the PI using VNC.

See copy and paste is not working so smoothly when you have only ED as editor.

FYI - I do it all the time with both v6 and v7.

I suspect your configuration is either somehow different than mine in some way or more probably your expectations maybe is a tad different.

The way tty characters and how that is handled are independent of cut/paste.  There are differences in the tty handlers between v6 and v7

and the modes that ex/vi run compared to ed.  

Again I tend to mess with a V7 system with a few small tty mods to make more modern typing a tad more convenient - which we actually developed in the late 1970s.  I believe Noel has similar hacks in his V6/PWB mashup from MIT.  It all depends on what you want to do/what your expectations are.  Even on V7 back in the day, we had glass TTYs like PE Foxes, Tek 4025, LSI ADM3As, H19s, and AAAs -- so even then we wanted proper backspace operation and preferred ^U to @ for line kill.  Those changes are all very small and given we wrote them for V7 (on V7) years ago, I don't have a problem with using them today.

Again it's how far to do want to go...   if you want a UNIX closer to the most modern running a PiDP-11, then a version BSD 2.11 which will give you networking.  The PiDP-11 runs it just fine -and will boot to it].  Frankly, given that will provide you networking to/from the emulated host, you might find that more comfortable.

That's not mine.  I desire to use the system pretty much as a way configured in those days to test things I have long forgotten, reexamination of things we did, often with some level of nostalgia - we did an awful lot with very little.   I want a small level of comfort.  I've meant to install a few things from the original 2BSD tape like I had at CMU and on the Teklab's machines in those days.  Frankly, have not bothered.  I have a couple of old tools and as I said, I run Webb's s on my v7 system instead of vi - which is good enough. 

YMMV  ...  

ᐧ

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "[PiDP-11]" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pidp-11+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-11/CAC20D2MC2Ojart0mQFw6tSKob0JeuOFVib4UYyD%2B1c2Bh7uVWg%40mail.gmail.com.

[John H. Reinhardt]

On 5/15/2022 8:01 PM, Hecky Beckenbauer wrote:

Are there also guys on this mail list interested in the software ?

I'm not sure what you mean by this…  

From lurking for a while on this mail-list I got the impression most people are more interested in adding a case to the pidp11 and less of using the simulator .

Just my first impression that’s why i was asking .

That's because this list has been active since 2018 (April was the 4 year anniversary, I believe)  and you're roughly 2-3 years late for a lot of the discussions about software.  Not that they don't go on now, but back then the early adopters had gotten their PiDP-11's running well and became very interested in what to run on it.  Search back to the 2019 and 2020 threads and you will find month long discussions of UNIX V6 and V7 aspects and a myriad of other software topics.

-- 
John H. Reinhardt

[Hecky Beckenbauer]

Warner,

thanks for the reply.

so just a tar and then mount as a tape drive ?

So I should declare a TP in simh first .

Sounds like a straight forward way. I will try to make it work.

Thanks again

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 10:58 AM Hecky Beckenbauer <heckybecke...@gmail.com> wrote:

Warner,

thanks for the reply.

so just a tar and then mount as a tape drive ?

No, you have to convert to simh's TAP format.   Which is trival, but an extra step. [ see below]

So I should declare a TP in simh first .

You need to declare a tape such as a TM11 controller in the boot.ini and you will to ensure that Ken's kernel has it configured and that you have entries for it in /dev/*mt* [see the mt driver and man page for which minor devices are needed, and you'll need the major device number from the bdevsw and cdevsw tables in the kernel.

Sounds like a straight forward way. I will try to make it work.

It is except for needing to convert the tapes to Bob's tape format.

 

-- cut here --

Microsoft Word - simh_magtape.doc

SIMH Magtape Representation and Handling

Bob Supnik, 30 Aug 06

Magtape Representation

SIMH represents magnetic tapes as disk files. Each disk file contains a series of objects. Objects are either metadata markers, like tape mark or end of medium, or they are data records. Location 0 of the file is interpreted as beginning of tape; end of file is interpreted as end of medium. Pictorially:

Location 0:

+--------+
|  data  |
| record |
+--------+
|  data  |
| record |
+--------+

: +--------+

|  tape  |
|  mark  |
+--------+
|  data  |
| record |
+--------+

:

end of file:

Metadata markers are 4 bytes stored in little-endian order. The currently defined metadata markers are:

0xFFFFFFFF
0xFFFFFFFE
0xFF000000:0xFFFFFFFD
0x00000000

end of medium
erase gap
reserved
tape mark

Data records are consist of an initial 4 byte record length n, (n + 1) & ~1 bytes of data, and a trailing 4 byte record length n that must be the same as the initial record length:

bytes 0:3

bytes 4:n+3

+--------+ | record | | length | +--------+ |data| |:| |:|

               +--------+
bytes n+4:n+7  | record |
               | length |
               +--------+

Note that the data is rounded to an even number of bytes. If the record length is odd, the extra byte is undefined but should be 0.

Record lengths are 4 bytes stored in little-endian order. The high order bit is flag, indicating that the record contains an error; the next 7b must be zero; the low 24 bits are the record length:

bit<31>

bits<30:24>
bits<23:0>

1 = record contains error
0 = record is error-free
must be zero
record length, must be non-zero

The leading and trailing record lengths allow a record to be accessed either forward or backward.

Magtape Operations
Magnetic tape drives can perform the following operations:

• Read forward

• Read backward

• Write forward

• Space forward record(s)

• Space backward record(s)

• Space forward file(s)

• Space backward file(s)

• Write tape mark

• Security erase

• Write erase gap

  On a real magtape, all operations are implicitly sequential, that is, they start from the current position of the tape medium. SIMH implements this with the concept of the current tape position, kept in the pos field of the tape drive’s UNIT structure. SIMH starts all magtape operations at the current position and updates the current position to reflect the results of the operation:

• Read forward. Starting at the current position, read the next 4 bytes from the file, skipping any intervening gap. If those bytes are a valid record length, read the data record and position the tape past the trailing record length. If they are a tape mark, signal tape mark and position the tape past the tape

mark. If they are end of medium, or an end of file occurs, signal no more data

(‘long gap’ or ‘bad tape’) and do not change the tape position.

• Read reverse. If the current position is beginning of tape, signal BOT.

  Otherwise, starting at the current position, read the preceding 4 bytes from the file, skipping any intervening gap. If those bytes are a valid record length, read the data record and position the tape before the initial record length. If they are a tape mark, signal tape mark and position the tape before the tape mark. If they are end of medium, or an end of file occurs, signal no more data (‘long gap’ or ‘bad tape’) and position the tape before the end of medium marker.

• Write. Starting at the current position, write the initial record length, followed by the data record, followed by the trailing record length. Position the tape after the trailing record length.

• Space forward record(s). Starting at the current position, read the next 4 bytes from the file, skipping any intervening gap. If those bytes are a valid record length, position the tape past the trailing record length and continue until operation count exhausted or metadata encountered. If those bytes are a tape mark, signal tape mark and position the tape after the tape mark. If they are end of medium, or an end of file occurs, signal no more data (‘long gap’ or ‘bad tape’) and do not change the tape position.

• Space reverse record(s). If the current position is beginning of tape, signal BOT. Otherwise, starting at the current position, read the preceding 4 bytes from the file, skipping any intervening gap. If those bytes are a valid record length, position the tape before the initial record length and continue until operation count exhausted, BOT, or metadata encountered. If they are a tape mark, signal tape mark and position the tape before the tape mark. If they are end of medium, or an end of file occurs, signal no more data (‘long gap’ or ‘bad tape’) and position the tape before the end of medium marker.

• Space forward file(s). Starting at the current position, read the next 4 bytes from the file, skipping any intervening gap. If those bytes are a valid record length, position the tape past the trailing record length and continue. If those bytes are a tape mark, signal tape mark, position the tape after the tape mark, and continue until operation count exhausted. If they are end of medium, or an end of file occurs, signal no more data (‘long gap’ or ‘bad tape’) and do not change the tape position.

• Space reverse file(s). If the current position is beginning of tape, signal BOT. Otherwise, starting at the current position, read the preceding 4 bytes from the file, skipping any intervening gap. If those bytes are a valid record length, position the tape before the initial record length and continue. If they are a tape mark, position the tape before the tape mark and continue until operation count exhausted or BOT. If they are end of medium, or an end of file occurs, signal no more data (‘long gap’ or ‘bad tape’) and position the tape before the end of medium marker.

• Write tape mark. Starting at the current position, write a tape mark marker. Position the tape beyond the new tape mark.

• Security erase. Starting at the current position, write an end of medium marker. Do not update the tape position.

• Write erase gap. Starting at the current position, erase the amount of tape indicated by the specified length and bpi. If the end of the gap overwrites an existing record, shorten that record appropriately. Position the tape after the gap.

  Magtape Emulation Library
  

<<-- deleted ass it not copy from the PDF well -->>

SIMH provides a support library, sim_tape.c (and its header file sim_tape.h), that implements the standard tape format and functions. The library is described in detail in the associated document, “Writing A Simulator For The SIMH System”.

ᐧ

[Clem Cole]

BTW: in the simh sources is a directory called *tools which include a number of scripts to create Bob's format.  There is one in Perl IIRC, I have one in C I wrote before that showed up and I think I saw that Will Senn wrote in python.

ᐧ

[Anton Lavrentiev]

I don't think you need to convert anything, just use a raw disk drive of an appropriate size (yes, you will probably need to be root to extract files from such a "tar file"): attach the tar file as a disk drive unit in SimH (I'd suggest using the -r switch for read-only attachment), then use the corresponding device as an argument to the -f switch with tar in unix...

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "[PiDP-11]" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pidp-11+u...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-11/CAC20D2O09cxJmfgkWwqSxSKjBQMrzcZVe4YAeRbV2uL3MBu%3D5g%40mail.gmail.com.

[Mark Pizzolato]

Actually, there is a separate repo which contains the simtools things.  This is located at https://github.com/simh/simtools

 

Meanwhile, current simh version tape supports simple attachment of tar files:

     sim> ATTACH TS0 -f tar <tar-file>

- Mark

[Clem Cole]

On Mon, May 16, 2022, at 11:13 AM, Anton Lavrentiev <anton.la...@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think you need to convert anything, just use a raw disk drive of an appropriate size (yes, you will probably need to be root to extract files from such a "tar file"): attach the tar file as a disk drive unit in SimH (I'd suggest using the -r switch for read-only attachment), then use the corresponding device as an argument to the -f switch with tar in unix...

Anton - thanks -- As Mark points out, he has added support in the attach command for a number of tape formats to the current simh repo's :

 -F          Open the indicated tape container in a specific format  (default is SIMH, alternatives are E11, TPC, P7B, AWS, TAR, ANSI-VMS, ANSI-RT11, ANSI-RSX11, ANSI-RSTS, ANSI-VAR, FIXED, DOS11)

Warning, Mark created a newish feature and I do not believe it is also in Bob's 3.X stream supports them - only Bob's original 'TAP' format (which Mark is calling simh above).

As I said, if I'm using a tape, I just convert it to Bob's format and don't rely on Mark knowing about it.  There are infinite numbers of tape formats.  The big issue with UNIX is that the official POSIX Unix-Standard-Tar or USTAR format [which I helped to originally define for POSIX in the late 1980s BTW] is not the only format.  FWIW: There is tp for v5/v6, cpio numerous flavors, dump plus sadly a few of variants on TAR itself.

When and if Mark's switch works for you, I'm sure it can be wonderful.  The truth is I'm not sure what it means when he says 'tar'  - since that can mean a number of things.    As a long-time system guy and in particular, a creator of some of the UNIX tech you all are using, when I'm using tapes themselves, I'll personally add the extra step to convert to the virtual format and let the emulated SW do the work.   Otherwise, I just use raw disk blocks.

ᐧ

[Mark Pizzolato]

simh TAR format merely takes the data in the "tarfile" and presents it via the tape drive in chunks one at a time.  The default chunk size is the default block size for most tar (10240 bytes).  You can override the default 10240 value with:

    sim> ATTACH TM0 -FB TAR 20480 tarfile

or somewhat more clearly:

   sim> SET TM0 FORMAT=TAR

   sim> ATTACH TM0 -B 20480 tarfile

Given what this is doing here, TAR format may also be useful for other data formats (CPIO, etc.)