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Status of PI ITS distribution?
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Joe Oswald
Jan 15, 2013, 8:05:41 PM1/15/13
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I apologize for asking about a topic which some feel has probably been discussed to death. And I don't mean to debate the law or legal system. However, the only background I can find on this reading between the lines in alt.sys.pdp10 discussions and other stuff that is little better than hints and rumors. I'm guessing an archive of ITS-HACKERS would have more information, but that doesn't seem to exist. (its-hacker...@cosmic.com says I need an admin to subscribe.)
I'm aware that at least at http://pdp10.nocrew.org/its/swiss/ one can find the contents of SYSDOC; and SYSTEM; with GPL license terms indicated. A few other directories are available from that site, without clear terms.
I'm also aware that in the past http://www.its.os.org/ (now quasi-permanently down?) held more-or-less-sanitized-of-personal-data snapshots of ITS systems, including pi-its-a11110.tar. I also have
seen emulated ITS systems running from that PI distribution, with a few additional patches. I've also seen things like the PDP-10 Info file and DDT Primer HTML-ized and available on the web.
Unfortunately, the GPL sources seem to lack even :PEEK and :LOCK utilities, and what seems to be a lot of other basic stuff. From a hacker point of view, it lacks MIDAS, TECO, and EMACS, which are
pretty core tools. (I don't know how important LISP is to the running of the system beyond INQUIR, which I guess I could live without.) The documentation is similarly lacking: DDT ORDER and DDT > are missing.
What I have not been able to find is
1. any clear announcement of the GPL release of SYSTEM; and SYSDOC; which might have given some context.
2. any clear description of the current or future status of PI (Does this stand for "Public ITS" and what kind of "Public" is meant??) materials. What were the terms by which the material in pi-its-a11110.tar was shared? Is it unavailable because of legal reasons or just a dead host?
I am comfortable running an emulated ITS system on my own personal computer, and playing around.
What I would *like* to do is
1. Texinfo-ize or otherwise reformat contents of .INFO.; INFO; etc. so that I can read these info files in nicely hyperlinked HTML, modern Info, and Docbook/Epub formats so I can browse them in an e-reader, and publish these reformatted versions for others to browse.
I could do so with a big disclaimer that I have no rights to the material, but that's obviously less than ideal, and probably limits where I could host this stuff. Even publishing patches is hard without those patches including a bunch of the original material.
2. (More speculatively) see what it would take to bootstrap ITS onto a 64-bit PDP-like system that I could emulate on something like a Raspberry PI or 64-bit workstation. Obviously, I would need to do quite a bit of hacking to convert 36-bit stuff into 64-bits, but maybe a lot of it can be semi-automatic.
For my starting point I'd like to have a distribution of ITS-related sources I can host in a Git repository, and be able to bootstrap a cross-assembling version of MIDAS on it, with the goal of getting a
self-hosting MIDAS64 and then working on getting ITS sources converted to my 64-bit architecture.
Without MIDAS included in the GPL release, or on equivalent terms, I'm basically stopped at the starting line.
Can anyone provide any additional information or guidance?
--Joe Oswald
P.S.
Also, I'd be interested if anyone knows where I can find a copy of PDP100 IDEAS which was on SV at some point. My current idea for 64-bit extension is simply extending the 18-bit address word to 32-bits, and am a little on the fence about whether that extension should look like 14-bit section number + 18-bit intra-section address, just 32-bit section addresses and living in a single 4 GW section 0, or some choice in-between, plus some extension mechanism for "super-sized sections" to go beyond 4 GW.
I have seen the DEC documentation on 30-bit addresses, and was thinking of trying to follow that to some 54-or-so-bit conclusion, but I don't have much real understanding of even basic PDP-10 stuff, much less these hairy bits.
I'm aware that at least at http://pdp10.nocrew.org/its/swiss/ one can find the contents of SYSDOC; and SYSTEM; with GPL license terms indicated. A few other directories are available from that site, without clear terms.
I'm also aware that in the past http://www.its.os.org/ (now quasi-permanently down?) held more-or-less-sanitized-of-personal-data snapshots of ITS systems, including pi-its-a11110.tar. I also have
seen emulated ITS systems running from that PI distribution, with a few additional patches. I've also seen things like the PDP-10 Info file and DDT Primer HTML-ized and available on the web.
Unfortunately, the GPL sources seem to lack even :PEEK and :LOCK utilities, and what seems to be a lot of other basic stuff. From a hacker point of view, it lacks MIDAS, TECO, and EMACS, which are
pretty core tools. (I don't know how important LISP is to the running of the system beyond INQUIR, which I guess I could live without.) The documentation is similarly lacking: DDT ORDER and DDT > are missing.
What I have not been able to find is
1. any clear announcement of the GPL release of SYSTEM; and SYSDOC; which might have given some context.
2. any clear description of the current or future status of PI (Does this stand for "Public ITS" and what kind of "Public" is meant??) materials. What were the terms by which the material in pi-its-a11110.tar was shared? Is it unavailable because of legal reasons or just a dead host?
I am comfortable running an emulated ITS system on my own personal computer, and playing around.
What I would *like* to do is
1. Texinfo-ize or otherwise reformat contents of .INFO.; INFO; etc. so that I can read these info files in nicely hyperlinked HTML, modern Info, and Docbook/Epub formats so I can browse them in an e-reader, and publish these reformatted versions for others to browse.
I could do so with a big disclaimer that I have no rights to the material, but that's obviously less than ideal, and probably limits where I could host this stuff. Even publishing patches is hard without those patches including a bunch of the original material.
2. (More speculatively) see what it would take to bootstrap ITS onto a 64-bit PDP-like system that I could emulate on something like a Raspberry PI or 64-bit workstation. Obviously, I would need to do quite a bit of hacking to convert 36-bit stuff into 64-bits, but maybe a lot of it can be semi-automatic.
For my starting point I'd like to have a distribution of ITS-related sources I can host in a Git repository, and be able to bootstrap a cross-assembling version of MIDAS on it, with the goal of getting a
self-hosting MIDAS64 and then working on getting ITS sources converted to my 64-bit architecture.
Without MIDAS included in the GPL release, or on equivalent terms, I'm basically stopped at the starting line.
Can anyone provide any additional information or guidance?
--Joe Oswald
P.S.
Also, I'd be interested if anyone knows where I can find a copy of PDP100 IDEAS which was on SV at some point. My current idea for 64-bit extension is simply extending the 18-bit address word to 32-bits, and am a little on the fence about whether that extension should look like 14-bit section number + 18-bit intra-section address, just 32-bit section addresses and living in a single 4 GW section 0, or some choice in-between, plus some extension mechanism for "super-sized sections" to go beyond 4 GW.
I have seen the DEC documentation on 30-bit addresses, and was thinking of trying to follow that to some 54-or-so-bit conclusion, but I don't have much real understanding of even basic PDP-10 stuff, much less these hairy bits.
Lars Brinkhoff
Feb 21, 2017, 4:41:34 AM2/21/17
to
Joe Oswald wrote:
> Also, I'd be interested if anyone knows where I can find a copy of PDP100
> IDEAS which was on SV at some point.
It's still there:
> Also, I'd be interested if anyone knows where I can find a copy of PDP100
> IDEAS which was on SV at some point.
http://its.svensson.org/PAUL%3bPDP100%20IDEAS
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