Proposal for add-on package to pidp8i

[Obsolescence]

All,

I seem to have less of a Brain Fog the last two weeks (yay! hope it lasts). So I spent some enjoyable time working on the PiDPs.

A lot of nice things have appeared over the last few years, and they will not all be known by new users. Or, actually, by existing users that do not follow the Google Group regularly.

Some very nice terminal simulators are available (Rene Richarz' Tek4010, Angelo Papenhoff's lightweight but pretty VT-05/52, Lars Brinkhoff's super-exact VT-100) and utilities like Ian Anderson's OS8View & VC-8 display, to name a few).

These integrate very well with pidp8i, but are not part of it.

And now, spectacularly, we have the cycle-realistic simulator as well.

My proposal: that I create a repository called AfterEight. Which can be optionally installed after pidp8i to add these things. It will not interfere with the core pidp8i package itself, just add to it.

In a picture...

(Yes, it's the wrong Eight in the picture, but the 8/I is the AfterEight)

Question 1:

Is this a good idea? Does it meet with approval? So many people have worked on the PiDP-8 software that I should better ask.

Question 2:

See the attached draft of a README.md that outlines my thinking for an AfterEight package. Does that make sense?

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Mike Katz]

Oscar,

I think that's a great idea.  However, I would add a prompt to the install script asking if the installer wants to install the AfterEight software.  That way the user doesn't have to find it in the documentation to learn that the utilities even exist.

What about all of the command line tools that Vince Slyngstad has for the PiDP-8 SiMH?

Also, what abouit E8 and the PDP-8 simple C compiler.

What other programs (both Pi and PDP-8) would we like to optionally install.

I'm imagining something like how Focal or EduSystem-10 comes up, prompting for floating point, 8K, multi user, Trig functions, etc.

Thank you for all of your hard work.

            Mike

P.S.  I'm still pushing for a PDP-12 after the PDP-1 if your fog lifts long enough😁.

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[Steve Tockey]

You are free to either reference, or incorporate wholesale, the set of DECTape images I set up for various programming languages on the -8:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/t2jlnxg3408vgi1ikny3b/ANt9S4DJaxgZoxOWVzQz30I?rlkey=vtwglwy018ummgcxpn8lcy8rl&dl=0

Even if someone doesn't want to run on DECTapes, they can copy the compiler/interpreter off of the SYS: DECTape onto their RK05-based OS/8 system. The DSK: DECTape has runnable sample code.

Start with the README.txt file, it explains everything.

As well, I can share some useful-to-me utilities along with a recreation of EduSystem-20 Basic. These can all be found here:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/m0jopqrsih43yb2l09hio/AEmbAbMK0aqZnbpJElPRf0A?rlkey=7clejquihl5ljavv7osui7g32&dl=0

Cheers,

-- steve

[William Cattey]

Actually, some time ago I began a project to foster a community PDP8 software curation site, PDP8-Alive:

https://poetnerd.com/pdp8-alive/

As proof of concept, with help from Rick Murphy, the original author, I created a live, and historical repository of PDP8 Adventure, which included the original code, the latest code (which is distributed in the tangentsoft PiDP8 repository), as well as a bug fix to the original code line.

I had mentioned it but not pushed hard on wider adoption.

The PDP8 Alive site made a stab at offering up scanned documents like several editions of the Small Computer Handbook, but I felt that proof of concept needed more work.

Let’s talk more about what kind of curation makes sense and can be made long-term sustainable.

-Bill

[Flavio Villanustre]

Oscar,

It is great to hear that you are doing better with respect to that brain fog! And I think that your proposal is a fantastic idea. It is always very hard to keep up with all of the associated projects, so having them conveniently available in a central repository with a simple install script is always very helpful. Now, a couple of personal thoughts:

1. While I love the quality of your work with the kits, what I personally enjoy the most is the walkthroughs and documentation, especially in your PiDP-10 manual, which takes the readers on a journey through a number of neat utilities, applications, and era appropriate software development exploration. I think that extending the PiDP-8 documentation to include something similar, as you are proposing, somehow would be a great way to bring the PDP-8 to life for those of us who never experienced that era.
2. I have been following the back and forth on the move or not to the cycle-accurate PDP-8 emulator. I think that giving the option to the user rather than forcing it is the best path forward for now. I personally don't care much about cycle accuracy (this may sound like heresy to some, but I'm feeling brave today).
3. I would personally like to have Deeper Thought (or an equivalent implementation running on simh) neatly integrated and ready to run with the standard installation. While adding and recompiling it with ILS is very simple, I think it should be something that could be avoided and would be better automated in the installation script. Besides needing to stop simh to run deeper by hand just breaks the illusion, so it would be great if you give a thought to including Deeper Thought too (no pun intended) and perhaps have it load with a certain switch combination on the front panel or something similar?
4. Last, but not least, I don't know if it's just me, but AfterEight sounds to me like the name of the chocolate mint product. I'm fine with it if you went for that pun when you picked the name, but just wanted to make you aware nonetheless

We are very happy to have you back! Keep up the good work!!!

Flavio Villanustre

[DR]

Ah, the After Eight mints, something my aunt would bring out at
Christmas or other special times.  Boy that was 60  years or so ago!


I, too, would like the blinken lights stuff, and there are a couple I
think, be available to choose simply by entering switch codes on the
front.  There was one very interesting one which the author used some
code that was not in public domain that he could find and the author
never responded to  his request to do it, so there was a multiple step
process to gather and compile/assemble and then load in some way.


I never was able to get it to work, (must have been too many After Eight
mints as a kid) but would hope someone would make it easier to load.


I too express wonder and amazement at the work you and those  you lead
in this  hobby effort to do these computers.  Thanks.  Dale

[Obsolescence]

A question - I've always struggled with the makefile of pidp8i, it is big.

What I cannot figure out, what do I add after
./configure && tools/mmake

so it only compiles the simulator, and does not go through the whole process of OS/8 disk image generation etc?

This matters for the 'AfterEight' add-on, I think it is good to build the binaries for the Cycle Realistic version in its install script.

But I can't figure out how to 'just' build the pidp8i-sim binary! It is overkill to build the whole project again, and at the same time, I do not want to assume there already is a fossil repository from the pidp8i install process.

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Warren Young]

On Dec 12, 2024, at 10:34, Obsolescence <vermeul...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What I cannot figure out, what do I add after
> ./configure && tools/mmake
>
> so it only compiles the simulator

$ make pidp8i-sim

> I do not want to assume there already is a fossil repository from the pidp8i install process.

Why not? When you clone it, that’s a complete, standalone copy of the project’s history at the point of the last clone/pull.

You’re free to stand that clone up elsewhere, including on the very machine you did the clone:

$ fossil ui /path/to/pidp8i.fossil

[Warren Young]

On Dec 12, 2024, at 10:56, Warren Young <tange...@gmail.com> wrote:
> $ make pidp8i-sim

Minor detail missed:

$ make bin/pidp8i-sim

[Randy Merkel]

Q1 - sounds like a great idea IMHO.

Q2 - looks okay, but I not sure how to install "on my laptop". Install just the same as on the PI??

BTW... info on the PiDP-1? ;)

Randy

[Obsolescence]

Warren,

On Thursday, December 12, 2024 at 6:57:02 PM UTC+1 tange...@gmail.com wrote:

$ make bin/pidp8i-sim

But that can only be done *after* running mmake, and mmake will build everything when it is called.

Indeed, I wanted to have this 'AfterEight' script pull a fresh pidp8i from fossil. 

Yes - in principle, everyone would have built pidp8i from fossil. But they might have messed with it. I thought it safer to get the latest version straight off fossil and build afresh - but only the cycle realistic binary. But perhaps that is excessive.

Do you want this AfterEight on your fossil system, or you prefer that I park it on github?

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Obsolescence]

Randy,

On Tuesday, December 17, 2024 at 8:01:08 AM UTC+1 rme...@acm.org wrote:

Q2 - looks okay, but I not sure how to install "on my laptop". Install just the same as on the PI??

No, the script would just realise it is not running on a Pi and install the same terminal emulators and a variant of their control script on the laptop. So you get the same nice VT52 simulation, but now for a remote connection. On the laptop, you of course would not mess with the desktop by placing icons for the terminals/wallpapering over the desktop, that would only be done when running AfterEight on the Pi itself.

BTW... info on the PiDP-1? ;)

It is so very nearly done, I just need a final respin of the PCBs used for the PiDP-1 case. But brain fog... on the 1-2 clear hours of my average day, things are piling up. But RSN!

Kind regards,

Oscar.

[Warren Young]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 14:26 Obsolescence <vermeul...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, December 12, 2024 at 6:57:02 PM UTC+1 tange...@gmail.com wrote:

$ make bin/pidp8i-sim

But that can only be done *after* running mmake,

After ./configure, yes. If there are any other prerequisites for that binary, they’re unintentionally undeclared.

Newer Pythons are griping about the code, but I think I have them squished on trunk. A more fluent Pythonista than me needs to check these two latest commits for sanity checking, but at least for the purposes of solving this question, this suffices to get a simulator binary without any of the other collateral:

     $ ./configure && make bin/pidp8i-sim

For macOS, I also had to arm-twist the PIP system to let me install the prereqs:

    $ pip3 install --user --break-system-packages pexpect

    $ pip3 install --user --break-system-packages pyyaml

I’ve never seen as much confusion in language package managers than with Python. Grrr.

[William Cattey]

Hi Warren,

As the author of most of that code, I apologize for your inconvenience. My Python understanding evolved as I wrote the code, and it was quite some time later that l learned that Python was going to use the same damned escape sequences in regular expressions that it used for print strings unless they were marked raw. I only learned this when I chased down the warnings I was getting in very recent Python environments.

The explanation is in https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html

What needed to happen was that any string being fed to a regular expression needed to be prefixed with "r" as you have done.

[Warren Young]

On Dec 25, 2024, at 21:37, William Cattey <bill....@gmail.com> wrote:

As the author of most of that code, I apologize for your inconvenience.

A donation of time isn’t an inconvenience unless forced, which this wasn’t. If the issue came from anyone else but Oscar, I likely would’ve left it to you to handle. My fix was as much a “make this error stop happening” thing to get me to the solution Oscar wanted.

The main question in my mind is, does the code still work as before? My ability to test that is limited to superficial questions like, “Well, does it run?” Anything deeper I must leave to clueful folk like you, including the biggie, “Does it run **correctly?**”

The explanation is in https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html

That answers my biggest worry: that \r might change meaning under r”” strings, from a literal CR character in the binary representation of the string to some Python extension to regexes.

Thankfully, it’s now a “logical” CR, handled as before, if I’m reading this correctly.