TSS-8 anyone?
Walter Spector
The first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-8/I with
TSS-8 (version 8.22 if my SECDED is working right). Of
curiosity, are there any TSS-8 systems still running?
One entertaining thing for us bored high school students
was to snag other users passwords by watching the teletype
input buffers in the bottom 4K of memory. Then wait for
an unsuspecting user from a rival high school to log in.
Walt
--
Walt Spector
(w...@cray.com)
Mountain View, California
_._ _._ _.... _. ._.
John Everett
In article <326668...@renaissance.cray.com>, w...@renaissance.cray.com
says...
>
>The first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-8/I with
>TSS-8 (version 8.22 if my SECDED is working right). Of
>curiosity, are there any TSS-8 systems still running?
>
>One entertaining thing for us bored high school students
>was to snag other users passwords by watching the teletype
>input buffers in the bottom 4K of memory. Then wait for
>an unsuspecting user from a rival high school to log in.
>
I'd also be interested to know. Don Witcraft and I wrote TSS-8. Don wrote the
scheduler, command decoder, and UUO handler. I designed and wrote the disk
handler and file system and the 680-I service routine and TTY handler.
Originally we wanted to call it TS/8, sort of a spoof of TS/360; but DEC's
legal department discovered that someone was selling an OEM tape system
called TS/8, so we settled for TSS-8. The first TSS-8 system was installed at
Lexington High School in Massachusetts, on a sort of beta test basis. There
was this 14 year kid there named Alan Sokol (I think) who was all over the
system. He cracked the system password really quickly, so we had to modify
the login procedure to make it more secure. When we upgraded it we changed
the password to SOKOL, and I don't think he ever cracked it. Wonder what ever
happened to young Alan.
The second system was installed at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.
Since complete documentation wasn't available I shipped with the system to
train them on how to run it. The DEC rep in the area knew a guy at Lowell
Observatory named Peter Kent who was using Percival Lowell's old refractor to
scout possible Apollo landing sites. We went up there one night and got to
use the scope. One of those magic events in one's life. Among the things we
looked at was Saturn.
So if not for TSS-8 (and the lateness of the docs) I would never have seen
the Rings of Saturn.
--
jeve...@wwa.com (John V. Everett)
Walter Spector
David J. Pittella wrote:
> I suppose you could still say that there is a
> system running time shared 8.
COOL!
As I remember, the 8/I we used had 16K core and
of course each user would get a 4K chunk of it. I've
always been amazed at how much programming could be
squeezed into 4K of memory. (Some cpus I use
now have as many bits in register space alone...)
David J. Pittella
Walter,
I am another 8 fan. My first computing experience was in High School on a
PDP 8/e running TSS/8.22B, this configuration was typically
refereed to as an EDUSYSTEM 50. I grew up in a suburb of Boston, and there
were many of these systems in High Schools. I know that my old High School
replaced the 8 with a VAX in 1983 or so, it had been upgraded to TSS/8.24
at some point.
I just recently relocated my family to Washington State, and I had to leave
my 8 collection at my moms house. I have a system that I was able to get
from
a friend that was working at a local High School, It includes a PDP/8e
with
32K of core, an RK05 drive, TU56 single tape drive. This High School
had modified a version of TSS/8.24 so that it would run on an RK05, not
a very high performance device to swap users to ... but it worked.
The TU56 was controlled by the TD8/E simple dectape controller
and not supported under TSS/8 .. they wrote a special utility to
allow them to use the dectape drive for backups ... running it hangs
users until the tape controller finishes its commands.
I also still have an ASR 33 Teletype and a spare PDP-8/m which is in
mint condition. I have almost all the MAINDEC diagnostics, all the
manuals and schematics. The system runs perfectly, I have made
a point to run it periodically over the past years. I have had some
failures,
including a head crash on the RK05 .. but I was able to resolve them
all ... the RK05 crash was painful .... but I was able to purchase a
complete RK05 for $20. I didn't have a CE cartridge ... but I found that
I was able to get it aligned by adjusting both heads for maximum amplitude
on track 0. The drive has worked flawlessly ... so I was lucky!
FYI - I was in Boston visiting my mom in June ... and of course I powered
up my 8, toggled in address 4200 .... ADDR LOAD ... pressed RUN and
the 8 booted TSS/8 .. so I suppose you could still say that there is a
system running time shared 8.
David Pittella
P.S.
I hope I didn't bore anyone, I am very proud of my 8/e ..... I can't wait
until
I can cost justify moving it across country!
Walter Spector <w...@renaissance.cray.com> wrote in article
<326668...@renaissance.cray.com>...
Al Kossow
From article <326668...@renaissance.cray.com>, by Walter Spector <w...@renaissance.cray.com>:
> The first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-8/I with
> TSS-8 (version 8.22 if my SECDED is working right). Of
> curiosity, are there any TSS-8 systems still running?
>
TSS-8 was the first system I spent any ammount of time on. It was
at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and ran on an 8e with
an rf08 (of course..) and an rk05. I just got back from there and
brought back what should be the sources on DECTape for it. Anyone
have a way to copy them for FTP? (Doug???)
C. James Cook
Oh, wow. This is a real small world.
I was the kid in Westwood High School, working at Project Local, that
programmed up this version of TSS/8 circa 1973.
The longer story was there was an NSF funded program - Project Local -
to introduce computers at (mostly) the high school level. There were
five member school systems at first: Westwood, Natick, Lexington,
Needham, and I forget the fifth. Other schools eventually signed on,
renting time, such as Arlington, Framingham, Dedham, and Xaverian
Brothers (private Catholic school in Westwood). Everyone used
ASR-33s for terminals. If the computer was not in the building,
they were connected by acoustic coupler (modem) on a dialup line
or hardwired modem or multiplexor on a leased phone line.
The original systems were all based on PDP-8's of various types.
Needham had a straight 8 running TSS/8 in 12K on a two platter
DF-32 (total of 64K) disk system. Lexington got into some data
processing, so they built what eventually became a large 8/I
system, having four DECtapes, a card reader, line printer,
EAE, and two RF08s. The lights on the RF08 256k disk were a wonder
to watch. Most of the other schools were a simple 8/I with a
single DF-32 running FOCAL, then later BASIC in 8K of memory.
Names of student programmers that I remember hearing included
Luther Goode - never met (he later went to MIT)
did the initial work to timeshare Basic in 8K
with swapping to DF32 disk.
Bill Swanton - from Needham more below
Charlie Hornig - worked at Lexington High - a whiz who
scored #1 in the country on the Math Olympiad
Jim Ward - wrote an interesting tape-based OS in Natick(?)
Albert Lester, Paul Garmon, Bob Davenport, Stuart Cobb
- all folks I hung out with from Westwood & elsewhere.
Bob Haven, Pam Ellsworth, Kay Olson
- staff of Project Local
Anyway, as the story goes...
Eventually, Project Local came up with a proposal to upgrade
the majority of the systems with 8/Es with RK05 disks. The larger
disks would allow some program and data storage, and the more
modern CPUs would increase reliability.
Bill Swanton, a student from Needham high, was hired to
produce a custom OS that would allow running a copy of Basic
taken from TSS/8. For some reason, since TSS/8 did not run
on an RK05, this was seen as the best way of upgrading the
capabilities of our BASIC to have string functions and to
allow program and data storage. I was doing minor chores,
mostly writing diassembly code, as we had binaries and listings,
but no sources. (Hey, schools are poor and software wasn't
really copyrighted back then like it is today.)
Bill finishing writing the OS, but did not have time to debug
it before he had to start his freshman year at RPI. For the
interim, we just modified the copy of the old Basic that ran
on the DF-32 to work on the RK05. In the longer term, I was
left to debug Bill's custom OS. This work went real slow.
Late one night, I found a listing of TSS/8 version 22.b
Leafing through it, I found all the disk I/O went though
a small set of routines (we would call this a driver today,
but what did I know back then). It became real obvious to
me that it would be easier to write an RK05 driver that
simulated an RF08. Yes, an RF08 allowed you to start
reading/writing anywhere on the disk (any address) for
any number of words, while an RK05 was a fixed block device
(256 words) and read/wrote only on block boundaries, but it
seemed a lot easier than debugging poor Bill's OS.
Somehow, I convinced the mgt. of this. Lacking source,
I typed in the 24k of assembly source on a teletype!
I developed under OS/8, and had to use some binary comparison
programs to insure what I typed was right, but it worked!
And the new driver worked! Eventually, we tuned the driver.
Swapping was programmed to work in just one disk revolution.
File access was modified into what we called a "kanagroo"
format - we would skip sectors, so while the disk had a
physical sector order of 0 1 2 3 5 6 7 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17,
we used 0 10 1 11 2 12 3 13 4 14 5 15 6 16 7 17.
Eventually, we did contact DEC and they were interested.
By that time, TSS/8 was up to version 8.24, after being
rewritten by Bob Shelly at DEC Parker Street (PK3) facility.
In trade for us giving them our sources, they gave us a source
of 8.24.
There were other minor developments in the background.
We did have a TDK8-based DECtape for which I added a driver
under TSS/8, but since the DECtape driver (written by DEC)
was an AC-transfer device and interrupts <<had>> to be off,
it was not available for general use.
Project Local eventually centralized all machines, for all
towns except Lexington, so we actually had three PDP-8/e's
there (or two 8/e's and an 8/f). We eventually bought a
pair of customer AC-transfer interface cards that allowed
us two join two machines together under a homebrew program,
so we could do a physical disk backup.
Last of all, I got ahold of a music program that ran on the 8/e.
Realizing that an "A" on a piano is 440 beats/second, it would
execute a CAF (Clear All Flags) instruction 440/second (evenly
spaced). CAF sent a 1.2 us signal down the initialize line.
Since the computer was nothing more than a large radio antenna,
er, source of EMI, putting a radio up against the front panel
would produce scratch music. The program came from Scotland,
and could even produce four part harmony if the notes were not
to short and high. I had a source, but I never figured out
how they programmed that one up. I still had hours of fun
programming up various songs, fugues, and rags at the time.
I graduated from Westwood High in 1975.
Writing this overly long story, I realize how much I learned
and how much freedom I had back then. Programming was never
as much fun as it was back then.
-Jim Cook
Walter Spector
C. James Cook wrote:
>
> Oh, wow. This is a real small world.
>
> I was the kid in Westwood High School, working at Project Local, that
> programmed up this version of TSS/8 circa 1973.
>
> The longer story was there was an NSF funded program - Project Local -
> to introduce computers at (mostly) the high school level.
I wonder if this program is how our local schools paid for theirs?
I used the 8I circa 1971-1974. It was shared by several local
high schools in Rock Island, Illinois, Moline, Illinois, Davenport,
Iowa, and the Scott County Community College (also in Iowa).
Perhaps one or two others. We had two ASR-33s at our school.
I actually saw the machine a few times (it was physically across
the Mississippi river from us.) It was in three racks: cpu w/16K
core memory in one, high speed paper tape in a second, and a disk
in the third. The TTY interfaces were in there somewhere too.
Lots of blinkin lites and the wonderful DEC front panel switches.
After mastering BASIC, we tried FOCAL and Fortran. These
forays lasted a few days. We then jumped into PDP-8 assembler.
At one time we were generating enough havoc with the system
that the site administrator removed the assembler! (He also
disabled the key commands for poking into memory from the
monitor...)
The high school took a detour into a PDP-11/45 (running RSTS-4)
for a year and then some funding problems forced us back to the
PDP-8. By then I had my drivers license and was more interested
in other subjects... I like to think that the only two things
I learned in high school were to drive and to program a computer.
(Both questionable. :-)
BTW, a good friend of mine used a similar PDP-8 in Sierra Vista,
Arizona during a similar time period. Those things ended up all
over the place!
Tracy Raymond Gibson
jc...@aleph.westboro-ma.peritus.com (C. James Cook) writes:
> Brothers (private Catholic school in Westwood). Everyone used
> ASR-33s for terminals. If the computer was not in the building,
> they were connected by acoustic coupler (modem) on a dialup line
> or hardwired modem or multiplexor on a leased phone line.
>
> Writing this overly long story, I realize how much I learned
> and how much freedom I had back then. Programming was never
> as much fun as it was back then.
>
> -Jim Cook
Great post. Jim! That was back in the days when students actually
learned something about computers and programming in high school. The
ironic thing is today we have such potential in the schools and it is
being wasted. I can remember staying after school every night waiting
to get some time on an ASR-33 (with the good old acustic coupler),
waiting to try some new code in BASIC. Students were actually
interested in learing how the machines worked and trying to understand
and improve the system. No one ever said, "That just can't be done
with this OS." We made it work because that was part of the fun.
I dreamed of some day having a computer of my own. Maybe not one with
a full 16K of memory, but maybe something that could run BASIC! To
have had something like a Commodore with 64K and a 160K floppy would
have been like having a mainframe. (Just think of the OS we could
have written for that!)
Schools complain now when they don't have a machine for everyone in
the class! And what do the students produce with their 32-bit virtual
machines? Greeting cards? Form letters? "databases"?
For the first time in history, we actually have tools for students (as
we were once) to *master* a revolutionary way of problem solving, and
yet these students with all their "Internet ready", "state of the art",
"GUI compliant" machines, cannot use them to solve the most basic
problems. The machines are not used to teach them new ways of
thinking, mearly to do things the way the have always been done (only
much faster now).
To us, the learing was a result of actually solving problems, so that
we could use the machines. Learing how they worked was where the fun
lay, pushing the limits of what was possible. We came out of the
class with some thinking ability.
The students today have no challenge. They are being cheated out of
that; and the sad thing is they don't even realize it.
I don't mean to rant on, but someone should say it.
Tracy
wo...@madness.tmok.com
On 25 Oct 1996 16:23:58 -0400, Tracy Raymond Gibson <tr...@fn3.freenet.tlh.fl.us> wrote:
>Schools complain now when they don't have a machine for everyone in
>the class! And what do the students produce with their 32-bit virtual
>machines? Greeting cards? Form letters? "databases"?
>
>For the first time in history, we actually have tools for students (as
>we were once) to *master* a revolutionary way of problem solving, and
>yet these students with all their "Internet ready", "state of the art",
>"GUI compliant" machines, cannot use them to solve the most basic
>problems. The machines are not used to teach them new ways of
>thinking, mearly to do things the way the have always been done (only
>much faster now).
>
>To us, the learing was a result of actually solving problems, so that
>we could use the machines. Learing how they worked was where the fun
>lay, pushing the limits of what was possible. We came out of the
>class with some thinking ability.
>
>The students today have no challenge. They are being cheated out of
>that; and the sad thing is they don't even realize it.
>
>I don't mean to rant on, but someone should say it.
i graduated in 1992, so i'm quite young by the "standards" in this newsgroup,
but i had an almost similar experience. our school was populated with 2
Apple II/Es and 2 XTs. never got much into the Apples, but i would spend
every second i had to spare in front of one of the XTs (Xerox 6060)
i learned BASIC and PASCAL (not Turbo PASCAL, noooo, none of that fancy
newfangled stuff. objects? what were they?) '85 i started playing on
those things. most fun i ever had, as well as the most i ever learned in
high school. 6 years later i bought my first computer. 386sx25, 2M RAM,
80M IDE drive and an SVGA monitor with a Trident 8900c w/1M. i was king.
i had more power than i knew what to do with. well, that trust old 386
is what i'm typing on right now.
it's a little bit different now (20M RAM, 850MB SCSI storage, everything
else is the same) running Linux.
i don't know why i posted this. just to let you all in on how some of us
"younger" people had things.
sometimes, reading this group, i really wish i was born many years earlier.
the chance to have 64K HD space and think that was tons would have been
neat. just the whole attitude towards things is more how i feel.
-wonko
Eric Smith
In article <slrn576aou...@madness.tmok.com> wo...@madness.tmok.com () writes:
> sometimes, reading this group, i really wish i was born many years earlier.
> the chance to have 64K HD space and think that was tons would have been
> neat.
Don't worry. In 20 years you'll be able to tell people stories about the old
days when you only had 20 MB of RAM, and no one will understand how you got
anything useful accomplished since word processors need 20 GB of RAM and 1 TB
of disk space.
And even further in the future, your grandchildren won't even believe you, and
will say "Yeah, and next you're going to tell me that you had to walk 17 miles
to school, through the snow, uphill, both ways."
Cheers,
Eric
lfo...@nucleus.com
My experience with PDP-8's began in 1968 with Mobil Oil Canada where I
was involved with the then new area of oil field data gathering and
control. Our first machine was a PDP-8I with 4k core, a DF32 disk and
an ASR-33. We wrote all the operating software (in assembler) with
the exception of the floating point s/w. Once into the project, we
realized that 4k was not quite enough so upgraded to 8k which was lots
at the time. Over the next few years we gradually went to 12K systems
with h/s paper tape, DEC Writers, RF08 disks, and later, the RK-05s.
Looking back, I am amazed at what was then accomplished by the
software community with so relatively little hardware. Programming in
assembler was invaluable as it provided my first real understanding of
how computers actually work. Ah, the good old days. Didn't you just
love those fixed disk head crashes. We also detected, after much
frustration and knashing of teeth, a DF-32 controller bug which would,
once in a while, write garbage on the disk on power up. Worse yet,
the next iteration of these disks (DF-32Ds ?) had a similar problem,
only it occurred less frequently so was even harder to pin down.
Some of the "neat" stuff we did was to strip down the Saber assembler
so it worked like Pal but retained the auto page escape generation
capability. When we upgraded to the RK-05 disks, I wrote an RF-08
simulator to avoid having to modify a ton of existing software. To my
surprise, it ran almost as fast as the RF-08 (still havn't quite
figured out how).
I'd love to have an 8E and the RK-05s now to play around with but am
cognizant of the fact that I would not likley be able to keep them
going for any great length of time. Oh well:)
David M. Razler
er...@goonsquad.spies.com (Eric Smith) wrote:
| Don't worry. In 20 years you'll be able to tell people stories about the old
| days when you only had 20 MB of RAM, and no one will understand how you got
| anything useful accomplished since word processors need 20 GB of RAM and 1 TB
| of disk space.
|
| And even further in the future, your grandchildren won't even believe you, and
| will say "Yeah, and next you're going to tell me that you had to walk 17 miles
| to school, through the snow, uphill, both ways."
|
| Cheers,
| Eric
Another reason for saving DF-32s! <where did I put my bottle of DEC Disk Wax
anyway?>
dmr
"And when I was nine, I was 10, 10 damnit! Kids..."
David M. Razler
david....@worldnet.att.net
John J. Francini
> I'd love to have an 8E and the RK-05s now to play around with but am
> cognizant of the fact that I would not likley be able to keep them
> going for any great length of time. Oh well:)
well, you could always run one of the software emulators that are out
there -- I run one on my Mac that simulates any size PDP-8/E with up to 4
RK05s and high/low speed paper tape.
I'd love to see TSS/8 run on that sucker...
--
John Francini
I speak for none but myself.
fran...@ultranet.com (home) fran...@progress.com (work)