[HECnet] Re: Hecnet addition

[Johnny Billquist]

Paul Koning wrote:
"Johnny" == Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> writes:
Johnny> Paul Koning wrote:
>>   RSTS does too (for sufficiently recent versions, like V10 or so)
>> -- though the NCP bits don't seem to be there.   But there's a
>> driver and it can be told to turn on if you issue the DECnet
>> control syscalls directly.
Johnny> Aha. I think I looked at RSTS/E DECnet SPD only, and didn't
Johnny> find any mention of it, back when I was playing with that.
That would make sense given that the support isn't complete.

Aha. Yes, that would explain it. :-)

Johnny> I wonder why you can't set it from NCP though? Weird if they
Johnny> have the functionality, but no "normal" way of enabling it.
Probably history.   I created the async DDCMP driver when I was doing
the (unreleased) PRO port for RSTS (9.6 originally).   I handed it to
RSTS development, and they integrated it into the release.   But I
personally never did the NCP work.   Probably because it wasn't
familiar code and it would have been a lot of work.   Instead, I just
wrote a little 10 line utility to issue the line on/off syscalls to
the kernel.

Way fun, and impressive. Thanks for that piece of information and history.
I guess they didn't see much need of DDCMP support in RSTS/E at that point. How did you select which serial port it would use, by the way? Or was this only done for the PRO?
Hmm, I guess it could have been passed in in the syscall...

>> On a Pro it even works in synchronous mode (because there the
>> "UART" is actually a USART).
Johnny> I don't think you can set it to synch mode in DECnet, though,
Johnny> so that is more of a theoretical thing.   But yes, RSX
Johnny> supports both synch and asynch mode.
What I meant is that I did synch mode, including for DECnet, in RSTS.

Ok. I misunderstood you. While you can use the serial port for DDCMP DECnet under P/OS, I don't think you can set it to synch mode there.
Even though the hardware supports it.

But for code that you wrote, obviously you could take advantage of all the possibilities. :-)

	Johnny