[HECnet] VT-62?

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Oct 3, 2013, at 12:03 PM, <lee.gleason at comcast.net> wrote:


Not quite.   TMS-11 used VT61/t and VT71 terminals.   The VT61/t is a specialized block editing terminal in a VT52 enclosure, but with a whole pile of circuit >boards full of stuff.   (All single sided boards, and about 1000 jumpers to make up for that silliness.)

TMS-11 never used a VT62.   They were built for TRAX, the most spectacular failure in DEC's history.   (From release to retirement was a week or two.)

  Maybe so. I probably conflated the 2 from remembering the the VT72/t, a slightly different VT71/t that we used. Editing on a VT72/t was a dream - I've never had a better editing environment. Multiple cut and paste buffers, and easy to use User Definable Keys,   a powerful yet obvious human interface, along with a programming language that could do an incredible job of text editing. We wrote entire systems in VT72 UDK language, and it was a kick to watch it do the work automatically. Programmers at this site   worked night shifts by choice, since that was when the 72/t's were free and they could use them instead of a VT61 in VT52 mode for writing code.

VT71 and VT72/t -- yes, two names for roughly the same terminal.   Perhaps the VT72 had a newer processor in it, I don't remember.   There was also an earlier terminal I saw in our lab but never at a customer site: the VT20.   That was like a VT72, but with a PDP11/05 doing the controlling, and it had two displays on it in VT05 enclosures.


TMS-11 was the first DEC group I worked for -- travelling fixer for that team.   Very neat job for a guy just out of college.

I wonder if I met you, Lee.   I worked in that job from 1978 to 1980.   If you had any on-site software repair done, that would have been me.


  I don't think you made it to our site (Composition Resources in Houston Texas). We had several visit from a wild man of a DEC hardware support person named Skip Bollinger. Perhaps you heard of him. Apparently his troubleshooting exploits were legendary. I'd retell some but they are way off topic for this list. One of the stories involved using a rubber chicken as a PDP-11/70 diagnostic and troubleshooting aid. Vice Presidents, both customer and DEC, were involved.

Rubber chicken?   Yikes.   You're right, I did not visit your shop.   And yes, I remember Skip, we occasionally worked together.   

  Good ot hear from someone else who actually used TMS-11 (and the best thing about TMS-11 - it used IAS for the operating system!). Say, you didn't save any tape copies of IAS software from back then, did you? I'm still looking for DECnet for IAS in particular.

Nope, I have no IAS leftovers at all.   Actually, TMS-11 was a slightly renamed Typeset-11 which originally ran on RSX-11/D.   It was then ported to IAS, but in the process all the non-RSX bits of IAS were turned off.   So while IAS allegedly was a timesharing system (though never a competent one, only RSTS did a decent job there), for our purposes it was just an overweight RSX-11/D.

BTW, I have mentioned this in the past: while TMS-11 had networking technology, that was not related in any way to DECnet.   I think it may have predated it.   Certainly it had routing before DECnet did, using the same "hot potato routing" algorithm DECnet Phase III used.   The TMS-11 version was independently implemented, around 1977, by Joe Mauro.

	paul