[HECnet] Tops-20 ANONYMOUS FAL Preliminary Testing Results/DAP Query

[John Forecast]

> On Dec 23, 2019, at 5:51 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> On 2019-12-23 20:24, John Forecast wrote:
>>> On Dec 20, 2019, at 11:21 PM, Thomas DeBellis <tommytimesharing at gmail.com <mailto:tommytimesharing at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Indeed; but there was a time when the PDP-11's 16 bit (64K) address space and eight register file seemed positively generous. That's when you compare it to the PDP-8's /single/ accumulator and 12 bit (4K) address space.
>>> 
>>> I continue to be astounded what they managed to do with that.  In addition to a nice package of languages, with a memory management unit (essentially a bank switcher), they got the thing to timeshare.  That's right; TSS-8.  There's one still running at the Computer History Museum on an 8/I.
>>> 
>>> So they got DECnet running on the PDP-8?  Wow.  I wonder how they did that; whether they re-targeted a BLISS compiler to emit PAL.  I remember looking at the source to PDP-8 VT (video) TECO.  Many awe most inspiring kludges.  What a tour de force. Very humbling.
>>> 
>>> 
>> That was implemented on RTS-8 and looks like a Phase I implementation - all hand-crafted PAL code. The floppies are available on the net and includes full source code. When I joined the DECnet development group in early 1977, there were a couple of PDP-8 developers as part of the group. I don’t know if they were developing a Phase II implementation but they disappeared after about 6 months - not surprising given the difficulties we were having getting it to fit in a 28KW PDP-11.
> 
> Poul took a look at the DECNET-8 sources, and figured it was actually not phase I (I thought it was phase I as well). Poul thinks it's close to, if not actually phase II. There are things in there that apparently did not exist in phase I.
> 
Yes, I agree. I just took a look at the code and the early dates match when Phase I was available (I was using it around the middle of 1976) and the later dates (mid-1977) would have been when we were finalizing the DECnet-RSX Phase II system architecture. The code claims to support NSP version 2.2 but I have no way to map that to a particular phase, only that version 1.0 was dated July 1975 and version 3.1 (Phase III) was dated March 1978.

  John.

>  Johnny
> 
> -- 
> 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