[HECnet] Thrashing about...

[Keith Halewood]

Hi,

I suppose this happens a lot with newcomers to HECnet, especially when there are long periods of apparent silence. I'm currently reconciling remembering the '80s while listening to (having read several times) Ready Player One audio book (incidentally, I thought the recent film was... OK... but nothing like the book), playing around in VAX/VMS on a 86x0 SIMH simulator and doing 'real world' work in .NET (C#) for a salary, goggling in almost disbelief at the megabytes required to do what we used to be able to do in kilobytes.

I have a vague recollection of TOPS-20 (possibly TOPS-10) so I built a SIMH environment.
I have a vague recollection of RSTS/E so... etc..
I have no recollection of RSX-11M but I tried.... and yeah, etc...

It seems it's VMS, VAX architecture (Alpha seems so new-fangled by comparison) for me.

(I'm sooo glad Itanium is dying by the way - what an evolutionary dead-end - but what do I know - 'Itanic' seemed prophetic)

Do any of you remember when UK Academia connected its universities together with X25 and 'coloured books' software? Yellow book was the transport, extending the addressing beyond the 12 digit DTE address, so you ended up with 000010500401.FTP.MAIL for example, to send Greybook mail via Bluebook FTP protocol. Redbook was to do with job transfer (remote batch job entry and processing, reporting). Pinkbook (I kid you not) was X25 over Ethernet.... And for a short while, I had set up X25 over Ethernet for DECnet between departmental microVAXen to the university's VAXcluster.

Well, getting to the point, the 'coloured books' software on VMS was rather monolithic so I began the task of splitting it up. First, I wrote a device driver to create a pseudo-device to handle opening a Yellowbook connection. From then on, using the queue/batch system for processing FTP requests etc.. I can remember it all but it seems so pointless trying to recreate past 'glories'.
When (in university days) you share a vaxcluster with at least 40 concurrents students EDTing then ALGOL68ing their programming assignments, it was fun to write a kind of 'TELL <userid> message' which mailbox'd a message to a central server which worked out if they were on the local node or somewhere else in the cluster, passed the message along and then broadcast it to the target user's logged in terminal.

Incidentally, I'm missing Algol68RS for VAX/VMS - not part of the hobbyist programme possibly because it was never a DEC/Compaq/HP product)....
Though why neither Bliss32 (in which I wrote the above device driver and support for Yellowbook) nor VaxLisp (don't ask why I would like this) are part of the hobbyist programme, I have no idea.

So, what am I doing now? Apart from working in the real world, I'm resurrecting the Star Trek game I wrote in Ada ('83) using SMG$ routines - a more or less realtime version of the turns-based versions you see written in BASIC. Sad? Probably. I don't care. I'm reliving some of my happiest times. I may retreat to VAX Pascal if it proves too much.

I'd still like VAX/VMS Algol68RS, VAXLisp and Bliss32.... because, well, just because.

Sorry

Keith
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