[HECnet] Running the RSX-11 MAIL-11 client on VAX VMS with the RSX emulation installed

[Steve Davidson]

Johnny,

Well…  Steven lives across the street but I doubt he still has any of the sources.  Scott lives in Arizona and I will be there on the 24’th.  I will ask him.

-Steve

On Sep 6, 2015, at 8:30 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> On 2015-09-06 04:58, Steve Davidson wrote:
>> Their are multiple versions of the MAIL-11 program for RSX.  One was written in MACRO-11.  Another was written in BP2.  I have not seen the FORTRAN version.  The BP2 version was used heavily by DEC Software Services.  It started out life on RSTS/E (written by Steven Reilly) and was ported to RSX (by Scott Blessley).  I worked in the same group with Scott in Maynard, MA.
> 
> Yes. That would be the one I have. Do you happen to have contact with any of those people? If we could get sources, there are a couple of things I'd like to fix, like Y2K bugs. :-)
> 
> 	Johnny
> 
>> 
>> -Steve
>> 
>> On Sep 5, 2015, at 10:53 PM, Mark Matlock <mark at matlockfamily.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Samosa,
>>>   The RSX-11 Mail system consists of 4 tasks as I recall. The ...MAI task that does most of the interaction with the user is a pretty straight forward Fortran program. Then the actually task that sends mail ...SEN is also a Fortran program. It communicates with the MAL$$$ task which is written in BasicPlus2 and this is the most complicated program as it accepts the various DECnet connections and stores the messages for retrieval by the ...MAI task. Lastly, the MAL$$$ program connects to a MAL... task written in Fortran whose sole job is to notify the user if they are logged in that they just got mail. This system was written by DEC and put on one of the early RSX SIG tapes, but I remember seeing the files also in a folder on ftp.update.uu.se which may be a better place to get the files as I'm sure Johnny has updated and improved them.
>>> 
>>>    As far as running on VMS, I would think it could be done. I don't know that you would have to run RSX compatibility, but that might be easiest. With out it there are probably a number of date/time routines that would need to be modified to work with VMS time formats. The Fortran is probably quite easy to port but I don't know about the Basic part. That said the RSX task sends email to VMS fine as I recall, but this is the area I would think would be most difficult. Also, the way RSX stores in the email files different than VMS a.
>>> 
>>>   Johnny could probably provide a much better overview however.
>>> 
>>> Mark
>>> 
>>>> On Sep 5, 2015, at 5:13 PM, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Guys,
>>>> 
>>>> Is it possibles to run the RSX-11 MAIL client on a VAX that has the RSX compatibility module installed?
>>>> 
>>>> Will it work alongside the normal VMS MAIL client?
>>>> 
>>>> I'm asking because frankly the mail client on MIM is much nicer to use than the standard VMS mail client..
>>>> 
>>>> Sampsa
>>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
> email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol