Re: Kermit on Itanium VMS
Frank da Cruz
: Etienne wrote:
:
:> To recap on your advice, I'm going to have to compile Kermit anyway.
:> And after I've downloaded the install kit I should replace the file
:> ckuusy.c with the one in your link. And I should do that before
:> compiling I assume?
:
: It won't help much after.
:
:> Do I need anything special in order to compile Kermit or will all the
:> tools be available and pre-installed? Also, do I need any special
:> permissions?
:
: You need a C compiler, which is commonly available, but it
: is an optional product. No special permissions should be
: needed.
:
As far as I can tell the replacement ckuusy.c file is exactly the same
as the one in the current C-Kermit 9.0 distribution:
http://kermit.columbia.edu/ck90.html
As for VMS 8.3 / Itanium, I don't see any reason why this or any other
recent version of Kermit would not work on it. But I can't swear to it
because I no longer have access any VMS box later than 6.2 / Alpha, and
that one just barely. If somebody could give me Telnet or SSH access and
a guest ID on any VMS 7.x or 8.x systems that have DECC and UCX or
whatever, I can verify and make any needed corrections and, when the time
comes, build new binaries for the archive.
VMS is one of the few surviving OS's that pays serious attention to the
now deprecated if not forgoteen concepts of stability and backwards
compatibility from one release to another, so any VMS / IA64 binary that
you find in the archive:
http://kermit.columbia.edu/ck80binaries.html#vms
(the ones at the bottom of the VMS section) should work. These are
prebuilt binary images, you should be able to just download and run
them. Release and installation notes are here:
http://kermit.columbia.edu/ckvins.html
http://kermit.columbia.edu/ckvbwr.html
Feedback by email to f...@columbia.edu appreciated (as you can see
I'm not able to check the newsgroup very often).
- Frank
Bob Gezelter
Frank,
On Itanium with 8.2, I had no problems with C-Kermit (native or
translated images).
- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com
glen herrmannsfeldt
(snip)
> VMS is one of the few surviving OS's that pays serious attention to the
> now deprecated if not forgoteen concepts of stability and backwards
> compatibility from one release to another, so any VMS / IA64 binary that
> you find in the archive:
As I understand it, z/OS will still run OS/360 load modules, such
as the PL/I compiler written and assembled over 40 years ago.
I don't believe the VMS currently can run any binaries over 40
years old.
-- glen
Ken Fairfield
wrote:
Since VMS is only 30 years old (barely), it shouldn't be too
surprizing cf. the 40 years noted above. :-) OTOH, user
programs linked under VMS 1.0 (necessarily VAX) will still
run on VMS 7.3 (VAX), with small caveats concerning access
to system structures, etc., that change with O/S version...
-Ken
Steven Schweda
> As far as I can tell the replacement ckuusy.c file is exactly the same
> as the one in the current C-Kermit 9.0 distribution:
>
> http://kermit.columbia.edu/ck90.html
The only fix in there was for the misplaced brace ("}",
"/* This is the most horrible hack ever */"). I haven't
fetched a source kit since 2009-11-20 (as my directory name
should suggest), so if that fix is in, then that's fine.
> As for VMS 8.3 / Itanium, I don't see any reason why this or any other
> recent version of Kermit would not work on it. [...]
Sounds right to me, but I haven't tested much there (or
anywhere else) beyond getting the thing built.
I did notice one questionable comment in ckvker.com:
$! 01-Feb-07 1.4? sms Added P1 options
where I said "1.4?" instead of "1.41", because I didn't know
if there was anything newer than what I was looking at.
Apparently, this is now known.
Bill Gunshannon
I understand the same is true of UNISYS and whatever it is they call
EXEC today (I last worked with EXEX 8 over 25 years ago and was truly
surprised when told my binaries could be run using the same ECL I ran
them with back then!)
bill
--
Bill Gunshannon | de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n. Three wolves
bill...@cs.scranton.edu | and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton |
Scranton, Pennsylvania | #include <std.disclaimer.h>
Michael Kraemer
I wonder if it can run binaries 20 years young.
Or would a VAX binary of 1989 run on current Itanic hardware,
out-of-the-box?
Ken Fairfield
Assuming that's a serious question (is it? really?), the answer is
a simple "no". VAX binaries are different from Alpha binaries are
different from IA64 binaries (because the underlying architecture
off the three are so different from each other). Period, end of
story.
Many (most?) VAX binaries could be translated to Alpha binaries
using a utility called VEST. Many (most?) Alpha binaries can
similarly be translated to IA64 binaries using the analogous
Itanium translator (whose name escapes me).
I don't believe there was ever an Alpha to VAX "back" translator,
nor is there one for IA64 to Alpha (or VAX).
-Ken
Arne Vajhøj
VMS did not exist 40 years ago.
But within the obvious limitation of the same instruction set, then
I would expect VMS programs to also continue to run forever.
Meaning that a VMS VAX 1.0 program from 1978 should run today
VMS VAX 7.3 and a VMS Alpha 1.0 (before version number
synchronization was done) program from 1992 should run today on
VMS Alpha 8.3.
Arne
PS: I don't think it is so unique.
Arne Vajhøj
Richard B. Gilbert
Err. . . How about RSX images in compatibility mode on a VAX 11/780 or
11/750?
After all these years I have a little difficulty imagining why anyone
would want to but given sufficient incentives it's possible to do it.
Ken Fairfield
wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought compatibility mode was
dropped after VMS 3.x. I do know that it stopped being shipped
as part of base VMS, i.e., for at least a while it was a separately
licensed product, but is it still available on VMS/VAX 7.3?
-Ken
Richard B. Gilbert
It was alive and well under 3.7. I think you might have to resurrect a
VAX 11/7xx machine and a copy of VMS V3.x in order to do it today.
I question if this is a real problem for anyone today. If it is, I feel
sorry (but not too sorry) for those responsible!
Dennis Boone
> would want to but given sufficient incentives it's possible to do it.
Imagining it isn't so hard.
One of the key things mickeysoft fails to understand is that _some_
people do occasionally need to use old data. We had a textbook written
25 years ago using MacWord 1.0 that we needed to read. None of the
Mac or Windows Words we could find would touch it. (IIRC, even the
version of MacWord which followed 1.0 wouldn't.) None of the word
processor format converters we could find would touch it. We ended up
using Word 1.0 to extract the text, and were fortunate that a student
around the office happened to have a very old Mac with that very old
software installed.
Archivists these days are trying to figure out how to prevent the
last 40 years of data and documents from vanishing down the ratholes
of history. They're faced with choices like doing one-shot conversions
to flat text, hoping like hell that newer versions will read older
documents, running old software on the ever decreasing collection of
old hardware, or running it in emulation. Like any other endeavour,
the working solution seems to be a hybrid.
De
Richard B. Gilbert
If the text or data is really that valuable you can print the text on
high quality (acid free) paper and copy the data to modern media. If
you can't read the original media, I can put you in touch with a guy who
makes his living reading weird, obsolete, or deteriorated media.
Keep in mind that Sturgeon's Law applies here. Sturgeon's Law is
"Ninety percent of everything is crud!" I'm inclined to believe that
Sturgeon's constant is far too optimistic; I think ninety-eight percent
is probably closer to being correct.
John Santos
@comcast.net says...>
The RSX-11 AME still runs on OpenVMS-VAX V7.3 (or whatever the official
name is.) As does ROSS/V (RSTS/E emulation). I don't know if you can
get support for VAX-11/RSX, since Mentec seems to have crawled into the
woodwork. We no longer have any supported ROSS/V customers, but offer
me enough $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. :-)
However the oldest RSX executables are from the early 1970s.
RSTS/E .BAC files from V6A (1974?) should still run. I don't remember
if anyone has ever tried anything older than that. Same with mid-70's
RT11 executables that ran under real RSTS/E back then. I'm not sure
when the original PIP.SAV was released, maybe with V6B (early 1976),
but it should still work on ROSS/V on VAXes unless it has Y2K problems.
--
John
Michael Kraemer
> One of the key things mickeysoft fails to understand is that _some_
> people do occasionally need to use old data. We had a textbook written
> 25 years ago using MacWord 1.0 that we needed to read. None of the
> Mac or Windows Words we could find would touch it.
There's a reason they called it "Word" and
not "Book" or "Text".
Should have used [La]TeX, i.e. plain ASCII.
> Archivists these days are trying to figure out how to prevent the
> last 40 years of data and documents from vanishing down the ratholes
> of history.
One might be tempted to say: if it's not printed on paper,
it's not worth keeping it.
Paul Sture
glen herrmannsfeldt <g...@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
Here's the oldest I have come across:
Image Identification Information
image name: "PLANE"
image file identification: "01"
link date/time: 15-JUL-1980 14:14:33.43
linker identification: "02.44"
And on VMS V7.3 (with SIMH):
$ r plane
ENTER 0 FOR VT05, 1 FOR VT52 :1
AIRCRAFT INSTRUMENT FLIGHT SIMULATION GAME
DO YOU WANT INSTRUCTIONS ? Y
THIS PROGRAM PROVIDES A PSEUDO-GRAPHIC VIDEO
PRESENTATION OF A PILOTS INSTRUMENT PANEL,
WITH REAL-TIME UPDATES AT 1 SECOND INTERVALS.
THE FOLLOWING KEYS ARE YOUR CONTROLS-
...
Unfortunately I don't have a VT52 emulator to run it on, and the sources
seem to be long lost :-(
On the other side of the coin, stuff in PHP is not only actively
deprecated, but spits out some pretty ugly warning messages to make sure
you notice.
One example:
<http://php.net/manual/en/function.split.php>
--
Paul Sture
glen herrmannsfeldt
(snip)
> Unfortunately I don't have a VT52 emulator to run it on, and the sources
> seem to be long lost :-(
I thought that a version of kermit I used to use included the option
of VT52 emulation. Or maybe I am remembering a telnet client,
such as NCSA telnet.
-- glen
Bob Koehler
>
> Err. . . How about RSX images in compatibility mode on a VAX 11/780 or
> 11/750?
>
> After all these years I have a little difficulty imagining why anyone
> would want to but given sufficient incentives it's possible to do it.
Is the RSX AME still supported under 7.3?
If so, then, yes, it may be possible to run a 40 year old binary
on the latest VMS for VAX.
But that depends on the definition of "run". The AME added
compatability mode emulation when the first VAXen without
compatability mode shipped. I'm fairly sure you could also get
40 year old images to run on SIMH on just about any platform.
So if I have SIMH simulating a PDP-11 on an Itanium, am I "running"
40 year old images on the latest VMS for Itanium?
Or do we require hardware execution of the instructions to at least
the extent that VAX-11 series microcode implemented compatability
mode instructions?
Bob Koehler
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought compatibility mode was
> dropped after VMS 3.x. I do know that it stopped being shipped
> as part of base VMS, i.e., for at least a while it was a separately
> licensed product, but is it still available on VMS/VAX 7.3?
Compatability mode is a hardware capability that stopped shipping
during the VAX 8000 series. The OS support, called the RSX AME,
continued to ship as an optional product and added a compatability
mode emulator so that VAXen without compatability mode hardware
could still run RSX images.
Bill Gunshannon
And, once again, people here have completely missed the point. IBM
(and I am pretty sure UNISYS) have maintained that compatability from
the very beginning with no breaks in between. We are not talking about
someone coming along after the fact and writting an emulator but the
original company thinking that backwards compatability was necesary
enough to build it into their products even after the original
hardware ceased to exist. We are not talking about "VESTING", we
are talking about just plain running old programs.
VMS has a lot in its favor, but its owners can't hold a candle to
some others in the business.
Arne Vajhøj
DEC could have kept PDP-11 compatibility mode in all VAX'es and have
added both PDP-11 and VAX compatibility modes to Alpha.
But I doubt that it would have been worth the cost.
The VMS market is not like the IBM mainframe market.
And UNISYS is mostly selling services and x86-64 servers with
Windows and Linux today.
Arne
JF Mezei
> DEC could have kept PDP-11 compatibility mode in all VAX'es and have
> added both PDP-11 and VAX compatibility modes to Alpha.
The lack of success of IA64 can be blamed squarely on the fact that IA64
doesn't provide PDP-11 emulation :-)
Richard B. Gilbert
Er. . . . How do you account for the success of Alpha?
Bob Koehler
>
> Er. . . . How do you account for the success of Alpha?
Implementation of F floating point, just like PDP-11.
8-)
Frank da Cruz
Both Kermit 95 for Windows and MD-DOS Kermit for DOS include VT52 emulation.
Also VT100, 102, 220, and 320 (the latter two minus some features like
downloadable character sets, page switching, etc).
http://kermit.columbia.edu/k95.html
http://kermit.columbia.edu/mskermit.html
- Frank
Paul Sture
glen herrmannsfeldt <g...@ugcs.caltech.edu> wrote:
I've a feeling VT52 support was there in the original Kermit, but not
C-Kermit.
OTOH, VT52 support is there on many Alpha consoles (all but the early
Alphas IIRC), so doing a SET HOST through to a VAX from one of those
should do the trick.
--
Paul Sture
Michael Kraemer
> On Dec 29, 1:05 pm, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae...@gsi.de> wrote:
>
>>glen herrmannsfeldt schrieb:
>>
>>
>>>In comp.os.vms Frank da Cruz <f...@panix.com> wrote:
>>>(snip)
>>
>>>>VMS is one of the few surviving OS's that pays serious attention to the
>>>>now deprecated if not forgoteen concepts of stability and backwards
>>>>compatibility from one release to another, so any VMS / IA64 binary that
>>>>you find in the archive:
>>
>>>As I understand it, z/OS will still run OS/360 load modules, such
>>>as the PL/I compiler written and assembled over 40 years ago.
>>>I don't believe the VMS currently can run any binaries over 40
>>>years old.
>>
>>I wonder if it can run binaries 20 years young.
>>Or would a VAX binary of 1989 run on current Itanic hardware,
>>out-of-the-box?
>
>
> Assuming that's a serious question (is it? really?),
well, yes, at least partly.
The owners of VMS could have made the various
transitions as smooth as Apple, for example.
Invoking an extra translator is not as "out-of-the-box"
as the z/OS example, IMHO.
So VAX compatibility was "broken" after 14 years, in 1992,
when Alpha appeared and one had to switch if one wanted
more powerful VMS equipment. Alpha compatibility was
broken after another 14 years, in 2006 (latest),
when more powerful VMS equipment had to be Itanic based.
If you look at the competition, PA-RISC lasted about 20 years,
Sparc more than 20 years, and Power turns 20 this year
and may still have left a few more years of life.
In this sense VMS is one of the least backward compatible
platforms out there.
Mark Sapiro
>
> I've a feeling VT52 support was there in the original Kermit, but not
> C-Kermit.
As Frank said, VT-52 emulation (and other DEC terminal emulations)
still exists in MS-DOS Kermit and Kermit-95.
C-Kermit has never been a terminal emulator. It works with whatever
terminal (xterm, console, whatever) that you use to access the system
you run it on.
--
Mark Sapiro <ma...@msapiro.net> Any clod can have the facts;
San Francisco Bay Area, California having opinions is an art. -
C. McCabe, The Fearless Spectator
JF Mezei
> well, yes, at least partly.
> The owners of VMS could have made the various
> transitions as smooth as Apple, for example.
I agree. This is especially true for the VAX-Alpha transition because it
happened at the same time as many layered products were abandonned and
not ported. Having a transparent way to move to Alpha with those
packages would have helped, even if performance wouldn't have been
stellar in emulated mode.
For Alpha-IA64 transition, I am aware of only All-IN-1 which was not
ported. Were there others ?
Paul Sture
<d24fd09f-8357-4aa2...@m25g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
Mark Sapiro <ma...@msapiro.net> wrote:
> On Jan 1, 3:18�pm, Paul Sture <paul.nos...@sture.ch> wrote:
> >
> > I've a feeling VT52 support was there in the original Kermit, but not
> > C-Kermit.
>
>
> As Frank said, VT-52 emulation (and other DEC terminal emulations)
> still exists in MS-DOS Kermit and Kermit-95.
>
> C-Kermit has never been a terminal emulator. It works with whatever
> terminal (xterm, console, whatever) that you use to access the system
> you run it on.
>
But no DOS or Windows here.
--
Paul Sture
Bill Gunshannon
And just how hard is it to create a DOS floppy with nothing on it but
MSKERMIT? Don't you have some old 8088 laptop floating around? I
still have a COMPAQ 386 and a Zenith 8088 that I use exclusively for
those times when I need a quick console with really good DEC emulation.
Paul Sture
bill...@cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
> In article <paul.nospam-89EC...@pbook.sture.ch>,
> Paul Sture <paul....@sture.ch> writes:
> > In article
> > <d24fd09f-8357-4aa2...@m25g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
> > Mark Sapiro <ma...@msapiro.net> wrote:
> >
> >> On Jan 1, 3:18�pm, Paul Sture <paul.nos...@sture.ch> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > I've a feeling VT52 support was there in the original Kermit, but not
> >> > C-Kermit.
> >>
> >>
> >> As Frank said, VT-52 emulation (and other DEC terminal emulations)
> >> still exists in MS-DOS Kermit and Kermit-95.
> >>
> >> C-Kermit has never been a terminal emulator. It works with whatever
> >> terminal (xterm, console, whatever) that you use to access the system
> >> you run it on.
> >>
> >
> > But no DOS or Windows here.
>
> And just how hard is it to create a DOS floppy with nothing on it but
> MSKERMIT? Don't you have some old 8088 laptop floating around? I
> still have a COMPAQ 386 and a Zenith 8088 that I use exclusively for
> those times when I need a quick console with really good DEC emulation.
>
No. I had a grand clearout of old stuff several years ago.
--
Paul Sture