[HECnet] New Digital Unix node TIGER on HECnet

[gerry77 at mail.com]

On Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:30:43 +0200, you wrote:

TOPS-10 (could it even connect to DECnet?)

It can! About a couple of years ago we were able to run DECnet Phase IV on
Ethernet, by running TOPS-10 7.04 on the KLH10 emulator. Alas, to idle the
emulator, the TOPS-10 monitor has to be modified so that it would make some
I/O to a special device which would trigger the idle code into the emulator,
but we never figured out how to do that.

Given that TOPS-10 comes with full sources and that the instructions to be
added to the monitor are just two or three MACRO-10 lines, that's the easy
part of the task. Instead, problems arise when it's time to actually
generate a new monitor from sources.

There is a guided procedure called MONGEN which asks for some parameters and
then generates some source files used to conditionally assemble and link a
new monitor (it reminds me of some very old "make config"). That whole task
is quite easy to follow and we were very happy with it, but then we
discovered that it cannot be used to completely rebuild the monitor, as it
assembles some minor code and relinks everything against a big TOPS10.REL
file which is indeed the monitor major block.

There are provisions to rebuild TOPS10.REL, but the Software Installation
Guide just directs to Appendix B, where it is suggested that, for more
information about building the monitor library file, we should read the
batch control file COMPIL.CTL. Unfortunately, COMPIL.CTL does not contain
any comment or explanation and we think it is intended for somebody with a
previous somewhat deep knowledge about such tasks, which we do not have.
Even the relevant manuals are not overly clear about this topic, and many
little details are left to immagination (or knowledge, as said).

We obviously needed (and still need) the idle function because of power-
consumption-related problems, so we were stuck and had to forget about that.
Anyway, when we used it, we were able to use SET HOST from VMS and to copy
files back and forth with COPY on the VMS side and NFT on the TOPS-10 one,
so probably even other DECnet functions such as NML would nicely work.

Cheers, :-)
G.


P.S. SIMH is not a viable choice, because it emulates only a KS10 CPU, while
DECnet requires a KL10 CPU for its attached NIA20 Ethernet interface.