[HECnet] VAX/VMS 1.50

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-04-04 22:57, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Apr 4, 2013, at 4:41 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:


On 04/04/2013 04:35 PM, Gregg Levine wrote:
...
$ sh network

                                NETWORK UNAVAILABLE

What kind of networking could I get working on this?   Pre-Phase-IV using a
device SIMH doesn't have emulation support for? ;)

I can upload this disk image if anyone wants it.

--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments

Hello!
I am impressed. What device is this that SIMH does not emulate?

It might emulate all I'd need.   I'm not sure what networking on VMS this old would have been like.   I just need to find documentation of VAX/VMS 1.50. ;)

Given the release date shown in the login banner (1979) it's probably Phase III.   Wikipedia says Phase III is from 1980, so it's possible that it's Phase II instead.

If Phase III, you could use the DMC-11 emulation in the current SIMH (discussed here recently), connected to something else that knows Phase III.   If Phase II, it gets trickier, because you'd need a Phase III node for it to connect to, and it would presumably only know to talk to that neighbor node.   (If it actually is Phase II, I'd be interested in a copy -- I've been working on Phase II compatibility for my DECnet/Python implementation.)   At least I assume that the "routing" ("intercept") mechanism that's marginally documented in the Phase II specs isn't in DECnet/VMS if that's Phase II; some very vague memory says that this machinery only existed to allow 36 bit systems with Phase II in the OS to talk to an external node via their Phase II PDP-11 front end processors.   I'd be interested if anyone can tell us more about that; I never paid any attention when I was actually working on DECnet back then.

There are people around who can expand on the weirdness of DECnet on 36-bit machines... I'm not good enough, but if I remember right, they talked phase II for a long time, with a phase III conversion/bridge sitting in the PDP-11 attached to the 36-bit machine.

I know I've read quite some documentation about it as well, but exactly where I can't remember... I don't even remember offhand what the additional 11/34 which was attached to the 36-bit system was called. But others here can fill in details. :-)

	Johnny