[HECnet] Multics online as node 1.770 (BANAI)

[Zane Healy]

> On Sep 6, 2018, at 4:47 PM, Jeffrey H. Johnson <jhj at trnsz.com> wrote:
> 
> On Sep 6, 2018, at 4:41 PM, Zane Healy <healyzh at avanthar.com <mailto:healyzh at avanthar.com>> wrote:
> 
>> Very cool!  I just got my Multics system up and running this last Sunday.  I was a systems analyst on DPS-8 mainframes running GCOS-8 from ’90-93.  I’ve come to the conclusion that not only is that knowledge all evaporated from my head, it also wouldn’t really help with Multics. :-)
> 
> Oh no, a stinkin' GCOS user! Just kidding, of course. While we aren't running the GCOS Daemon for batch/absentee GCOS processes (mainly because nobody has asked!), gtss, the interactive GCOS TSS simulator does work, if you happen to have any GCOS tasks you'd like to run. 

I’ve gotten into the GCOS TSS simulator on my Multics system, but that’s about the extent.

>> How on earth did you manage to hook Multics up to HECnet?
> 
> It's a hugely abusive hack. Since the DECnet for Linux code is written in C, and the FNP emulation is a C simulation of the FNP/MCS behavior, I've taken advantage of that to simulate a hardwired protocol converter. This also means that rather than having to (re-)implement much of the networking code in obscure MAP355/Level 6 assembly language, the off-loaded networking code which would run on the FNP can run essentially natively on the host. (The overall long-term goal, however, is eliminating host-based services and 'properly' emulating the Level 6 FNP at the instruction level.)
> 
> We a use additional emulated hardware infrastructure such as emulated terminal servers to ease management, balance connections between FNPs, etc.

I vaguely remember taking a course on, I believe the DataNet-8000 (we had DataNet-8’s).  In my mind, the FNP's were part of what made a DPS-8 an impressive system.  I’m not convinced that how you’ve achieved this is the wrong way to go, quite the opposite.  

> In other cases there is Multics software which is essentially 'extinct' but various descendants still exist, so we are working on backporting/crossporting the existing software versions back to Multics - this includes programming languages like XPL and SNOBOL, software packages like REDUCE, MACSYMA, OMNITAB, TeX, etc. 

Any sign of the Ada compiler?  Though I gather it was a pretty poor imitation.  One thing I want to do is find my K&R C book, and see how the C compiler handles things.  I was working on learning C when I first started working at the DPS-8 installation I was at, and the C Compiler we had was atrocious to put it kindly.

> Feel free to review our system news (pmotd -a) to get an idea of what we've been working on!

I logged back in this morning and reviewed that, a most impressive effort.

Zane



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