so it's 2021..

i dug up a IBM 365ED laptop, a modem, dialing up into this bulletin board that I discovered is a FIDONET hub.. and here I am

while I think this is better in the DOS/WIN95 subs, but is this considered classic?

I've been learning more and more about computer history, and im inrtigued how much CP/M (and DOS) have borrowed fro the PDP-11, my minicomputer eperience
is next to nill with them having been largely abandoned in places where I could play with them...

(save for a VT-100 terminal or an old teletype / printer that we used in CS class)

cheers all

- Steve Host
Guelph Ontario CANADA
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On 26 Jun 2021, Stan Hosdar said the following...

so it's 2021..

while I think this is better in the DOS/WIN95 subs, but is this
considered classic?

I think what is *classic* depends on when/what the individual cut their teeth on. For me anything <= 486 is classic (although that's edging up to the first gen Pentiums these days). There are kids today that think a P4 is classic, and then there's the old greybeards that don't consider it classic unless is drew 10KW and used paper tape.

Do what you like and don't worry about labels :).
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Stan Hosdar wrote to All <=-

i dug up a IBM 365ED laptop, a modem, dialing up into this bulletin
board that I discovered is a FIDONET hub.. and here I am

while I think this is better in the DOS/WIN95 subs, but is this
considered classic?

Works for me - congrats on the Thinkpad find, I love those old laptops.

I've been learning more and more about computer history, and im
inrtigued how much CP/M (and DOS) have borrowed fro the PDP-11, my minicomputer eperience is next to nill with them having been largely abandoned in places where I could play with them...

Have you seen the 3d-printed PDP faceplate driven by a Raspberry Pi? Looks like you could get your PDP fix without having to run old iron.

One of my first computer science classes was assembler on a PDP, I'm tempted to fire up an emulator and type in my old programs.

(save for a VT-100 terminal or an old teletype / printer that we used
in CS class)

I lament the loss of Weirdstuff Warehouse - it was a store that, back in the '90s to 2010 or so was a treasure trove of old hardware. Stacks of Sun Pizza box systems, old HP Apollo and DEC Alpha systems, old rackmount servers, and you could usually find a serial terminal or two lurking in the back, most likely a Wyse 50.


... Consider different fading systems
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Re: Re: what's classic now?
By: Stan Hosdar to Jeff Thiele on Wed Jun 30 2021 08:57 pm

what OS did a pdp-11 run? in particular what OS did cpm (and dos, etc) emula

PDP-11s counld run a variety of operating systems, including Unix 5 and BSD 2.x.

It is common to bind BSD 2.11 images for PDP-11 emulators. I think it is amazing that, to this day, BSD 2 is still somehow maintained.

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Re: Re: what's classic now?
By: Richard Falken to Stan Hosdar on Thu Jul 01 2021 03:07 am

Re: Re: what's classic now?
By: Stan Hosdar to Jeff Thiele on Wed Jun 30 2021 08:57 pm

what OS did a pdp-11 run? in particular what OS did cpm (and dos, etc) em

PDP-11s counld run a variety of operating systems, including Unix 5 and BSD 2.x.

It is common to bind BSD 2.11 images for PDP-11 emulators. I think it is amazing that, to this day, BSD 2 is still somehow maintained.

--
gopher://gopher.richardfalken.com/1/richardfalken

By the way, the original Rogue, the namer of the roguelike game genre, was originally developped on a PDP-11 running Unix V6.

For an expanded answer to the original question:

http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11#Unix_based_Operating_Systems

Operating Systems supported:

Unix 1 to 7.
System III
BSD 2.x
RSX-11
RSTS/E
RT-11

The site mentions that BSD 2.11 would be the best fit for loading Unix on a PDP-11 nowadays.


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Hello, Richard Falken.
On 01/07/21 03:18 you wrote:

Operating Systems supported: Unix 1 to 7. System III BSD 2.x
RSX-11 RSTS/E RT-11

Plus the RSX11-M-PLUS, the multiuser/multitasking version of RSX11.

There are still someone that develop on it, like Johnny Billquist (TCP/IP stack and apps).

Moreover there is a world decnet (HECnet) network over tcp/udp that links all the decnet capable computers. :)

http://mim.update.uu.se/

--
Ciao.
Fabio.
--- Hotdoged/2.13.5/Android
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On 01 Jul 2021 at 03:18a, Richard Falken pondered and said...

By the way, the original Rogue, the namer of the roguelike game genre,
was originally developped on a PDP-11 running Unix V6.

That doesn't sound right to me. Rogue began life on a VAX
running BSD Unix, not 6th Edition. Adventure almost certainly
made an appearance on the PDP-11 pretty early on, perhaps in
the Research days, but rogue would have come later; after all,
it uses curses.

http://gunkies.org/wiki/PDP-11#Unix_based_Operating_Systems

Operating Systems supported:

Unix 1 to 7.

One must be careful with nomenclature here: these are research
Unix versions, properly called "Editions" based on the edition
oft he Unix programmers manual that was current when they were
cut.

Similarly, the other DEC OS's listed had other versions; e.g.,
RSX-11 also had RSX-11m etc. An interesting historical tidbit
is that RSX-11m was written by Dave Cutler (then at Dupont),
who went to Digital and wrote VMS for the VAX. After leaving
DEC, he went to Microsoft, where he was the primary architect
of Windows NT (WNT = V+1, M+1, S+1). The internal structure
of NT is very similar to the internal structure of VMS.
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On 30 Jun 2021 at 08:57p, Stan Hosdar pondered and said...

what OS did a pdp-11 run? in particular what OS did cpm (and dos, etc) emulate with it's .com, .exe and other similar command lines?

Kildall was, I believe, mostly influenced by RSTS/E on the
PDP-11. My guess is that he heard about PIP (Peripheral
Interchange Program) there.

Gates and Allen were familiar with TOPS-10 from using the
PDP-10 at Harvard (and I seem to recall Gates's private
school in Seattle had access to some powerful -- for the
time -- mainframe-class machine, but I may be misremembering).
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Jeff Thiele wrote to Stan Hosdar <=-

Here's the current state of my PDP-8 FPGA project:

That's really cool. The oldest computer I've used is a VAX.

-- Sean

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On 01 Jul 2021 at 06:13p, Richard Falken pondered and said...

Re: Re: what's classic now?
By: Dan Cross to Richard Falken on Fri Jul 02 2021 03:01 am

That doesn't sound right to me. Rogue began life on a VAX
running BSD Unix, not 6th Edition. Adventure almost certainly
made an appearance on the PDP-11 pretty early on, perhaps in
the Research days, but rogue would have come later; after all,
it uses curses.

I sourced that information from the Early Roguelike Gallery. John Elwin
is trying very hard to keep a living museum of early rogue(likes) so if you have a valid source for that claim, he will LOVE to hear about it
and make the necessary corrections.

Well, the original authors were Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy,
with some input from Ken Arnold. Arnold wrote the curses
library that they built Rogue on top of at Berkeley. Rogue is
from 1980, 6th Edition Unix was '74 (tapes went out in '75),
7th Ed was '78 (tapes distributed outside of Bell Labs in '79),
and 32V (Unix ported to run on the VAX) later in '79. Joy
and Baboglu did virtual memory support in 3.0 BSD (before
TCP/IP!) towards the end of '79. Ken Arnold wrote curses while
at Berkeley, where he was a student from '79 to '83. The
earliest reference to curses that I can find is from 2.79BSD,
which is April 1980, though there are claims that there was
a paper written in 1977; I'm not sure I buy that, though, as I
can't find a good source for that time frame. In the original
curses paper from 2.79, Arnold gives credit to Bill Joy for
what is obviously termcap, which was done for `vi`. So I
think it's safe to assume that the work that went into curses
was probably done ~1979.

2.79 also includes a document from Michael Toy describing
rogue; Glenn Wichman has a history document describing the
history of `rogue` here: http://www.digital-eel.com/deep/A_Brief_History_of_Rogue.htm
Note the references to starting with curses; so whenever
Rogue was written, it post-dates curses, and a lot of
contemporary accounts put it in 1980: 6th Ed was long in
the tooth by then.

I found a site called "rlgallery.org" which is a "Roguelike
Gallery" and has some history notes that claim development
in 1981 through 1983, but with no citations save some really
sketchy link to a gamesutra article. I can't find any references
to 6th Edition beyond the rlgallery.org notes, but that doesn't
make a lot of sense to me, as I said before: if that early
work were done on a PDP-11, I imagine it would have been running
2BSD (any college in the UC system could have gotten the tape).

So yeah. I'm not buying that it was originally written for 6th
Ed. That just doesn't make a lot of sense.

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On 01 Jul 2021, Sean Dennis said the following...

Here's the current state of my PDP-8 FPGA project:

That's really cool. The oldest computer I've used is a VAX.

I worked with DEC Alphas for a few years, but have only encountered architectures older than that as a hobbyist. SIMH will emulate a VAX, but the problem is in acquiring the OS. HP (which bought Compaq, which bought DEC) still requires a license to use VMS. Up until fairly recently they had a hobbyist program through which one could get a non-commercial hobbyist
license for free, but they discontinued it. I'm not sure what, if anything, took its place.

I completed all but the Extended Arithmetic Element opcodes yesterday; it was much easier than I thought it would be.

I have, however, run into a small snag. The Mojo IO Shield uses all of the available IO pins, so there are none left for peripherals such as an SD card
or a serial port. I figure I have 4 options:

1. Try to use IO pins for unused switches or LEDs, despite those components being hardwired in;
2. Make a new fron panel from scratch with only the necessary components
(which I could, of course, make any size and with any layout that I'd like);
3. Forgo the front panel altogether; or
4. Move everything to an Alchitry Au/Au+ FPGA board which has more IO pins
and a virtually identical IO shield, but is physically almost ridiculously and unusably small.

Jeff.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken, who indeed was a racist thereby proving himself right.

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On 02 Jul 2021 at 11:08a, Sean Dennis pondered and said...

I worked with DEC Alphas for a few years, but have only encountered architectures older than that as a hobbyist. SIMH will emulate a VAX, but the problem is in acquiring the OS. HP (which bought Compaq, whic bought DEC) still requires a license to use VMS. Up until fairly recently they had a hobbyist program through which one could get a non-commercial hobbyist license for free, but they discontinued it. I'm not sure what, if anything, took its place.

I know little about this myself but I have heard of something called OpenVMS. Would that be an option?

OpenVMS was the marketing name for VMS after the introduction
of the Alpha. VAX/VMS 5.x was current when the Alpha was
introduced, and OpenVMS AXP V1.0 is what DEC ported to their
new platform and shipped initially. Starting with VMS 6.0,
DEC renamed the two versions OpenVMS VAX and OpenVMS AXP,
respectively.

OpenVMS was available under the hobbyist program for quite some
time, but the last VAX release was 7.3. After Compaq acquired
DEC, they ported VMS to the Itanium platform; this was right
before the HP acquisition. OpenVMS remained available for both
Alpha and Itanium up through version 8.4.

After HP enterprise announced they were dropping support for
VMS, a new company with former DEC and HP engineers (and I image
a few new folks as well) got started called VSI: they've been
actively working on porting VMS to x86_64 and are continuing the
hobbyist (or something kind of equivalent). Unfortunately, the
VSI "Community License Program" doesn't cover VAX processors, so
there are no more hobbyist licenses for VAX versions of VMS.

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Stan Hosdar wrote to Jeff Thiele <=-

what OS did a pdp-11 run?

RSTS/E, on the one I got to touch (once). They ran a multitude of OSes as
well as UNIX.


... Destroy -nothing -the most important thing
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Stan Hosdar wrote to Steve C <=-

At work, two years ago, a new CNC showed up..... with OS/2 Warp for a HMI.... seriously... no one knows os/2 anymore and I didn't even use it when dabbling in win95, DOS, etc.... so I have had to learn it.

Machine is from 1999.. os/2 is clearly in the classic era of GUI experimentation... woo drag and drop...

I wonder how many old telephone systems are still running OS/2 somewhere? I ran into OS/2 well past its sunset, silently running voicemail systems,
which needed a properly multitasking OS.

Nortel systems ran Windows NT 3.5 embedded driving their Callpilot voicemail systems. Since they ran on their own little network separate from the
outside world it seemed OK.


... Destroy -nothing -the most important thing
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Fabio Bizzi wrote to Richard Falken <=-

Moreover there is a world decnet (HECnet) network over tcp/udp that
links all the decnet capable computers. :)

http://mim.update.uu.se/

OK, now I want to get a PiDP/11 and network it.


... Destroy -nothing -the most important thing
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Re: Re: what's classic now?
By: Dan Cross to Richard Falken on Fri Jul 02 2021 01:41 pm

On 01 Jul 2021 at 06:13p, Richard Falken pondered and said...

Re: Re: what's classic now?
By: Dan Cross to Richard Falken on Fri Jul 02 2021 03:01 am

That doesn't sound right to me. Rogue began life on a VAX
running BSD Unix, not 6th Edition. Adventure almost certainly
made an appearance on the PDP-11 pretty early on, perhaps in
the Research days, but rogue would have come later; after all,
it uses curses.

I sourced that information from the Early Roguelike Gallery. John Elwin is trying very hard to keep a living museum of early rogue(likes) so if you have a valid
source for that claim, he will LOVE to hear about it
and make the necessary corrections.

Well, the original authors were Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy,
with some input from Ken Arnold. Arnold wrote the curses
library that they built Rogue on top of at Berkeley. Rogue is
from 1980, 6th Edition Unix was '74 (tapes went out in '75),
7th Ed was '78 (tapes distributed outside of Bell Labs in '79),
and 32V (Unix ported to run on the VAX) later in '79. Joy
and Baboglu did virtual memory support in 3.0 BSD (before
TCP/IP!) towards the end of '79. Ken Arnold wrote curses while
at Berkeley, where he was a student from '79 to '83. The
earliest reference to curses that I can find is from 2.79BSD,
which is April 1980, though there are claims that there was
a paper written in 1977; I'm not sure I buy that, though, as I
can't find a good source for that time frame. In the original
curses paper from 2.79, Arnold gives credit to Bill Joy for
what is obviously termcap, which was done for `vi`. So I
think it's safe to assume that the work that went into curses
was probably done ~1979.

2.79 also includes a document from Michael Toy describing
rogue; Glenn Wichman has a history document describing the
history of `rogue` here: http://www.digital-eel.com/deep/A_Brief_History_of_Rogue.htm
Note the references to starting with curses; so whenever
Rogue was written, it post-dates curses, and a lot of
contemporary accounts put it in 1980: 6th Ed was long in
the tooth by then.

I found a site called "rlgallery.org" which is a "Roguelike
Gallery" and has some history notes that claim development
in 1981 through 1983, but with no citations save some really
sketchy link to a gamesutra article. I can't find any references
to 6th Edition beyond the rlgallery.org notes, but that doesn't
make a lot of sense to me, as I said before: if that early
work were done on a PDP-11, I imagine it would have been running
2BSD (any college in the UC system could have gotten the tape).

So yeah. I'm not buying that it was originally written for 6th
Ed. That just doesn't make a lot of sense.

I forwarded this message to ElwinR. He says he has evidence from the RRP that Rogue V3 was
developped on a PDP-11, and that it was Rogue V4 what was done on 4BSD on a VAX. He also agrees
he lacks reliable citations for claiming Unix V6 was the first platform on which Rogue was
developped so he is going to make some corrections on his site.

Cheers!


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