[HECnet] KLH-10 TOPS-10 DECnet Executor Configuration Persistence

[Thomas DeBellis]

You mean have something external sitting on the CTY, typing into it and 
not bothering to determine where all this stuff goes in Tops-10?  Well, 
that's certainly one way to skin that particular cat...

But I don't remember having to do much of anything to Tops-10 to get it 
to come up except maybe type the date and time in case the PDP-11 didn't 
happen to have it.  I forget about the KA and KI; I think they needed a 
bootstrap toggled in, but this could be left in low core.

I don't think it would be a terrible idea to understand just a little 
bit more to know what start up files to edit, but I certainly do 
understand not wanting to be bothered with something.  If I remember any 
more, I'll let you know.

The new SIMH port appears to allow for a slaved PDP-6, which I remember 
seeing on the 9th floor (It was connected to the MIT AI KA-10).  I think 
they only shared one moby.  The last I heard was that the KL sources to 
ITS (MC) were lost.  Anyway, if the SIMH KL simulator allows multiple 
CPU's, then you could run Tops-10 SMP, which really was a tour de 
force.  Extremely cool.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 3/10/20 10:41 PM, Supratim Sanyal wrote:
>
> 31.37 (TWONKY) is just a straight TWONKY distribution on KLH-10. All 
> required keyboard interactions to get it to boot up are consistently 
> the same; so I might be able to wrap it up around an expect script ... 
> worth a shot.
>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On 3/10/20 9:46 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>>
>> I think you're right, but it has been _decades_ since I last used 
>> Tops-10.  At WPI, we had a KA-10 running a much modified 6.03 series 
>> monitor that we were quite proud of.  At Marlboro, the project that I 
>> was working on (FILE-FINDER, a database for DUMPER tapes) was quite 
>> Tops-20 centric; we depended on files with holes in them.
>>
>> I'm unaware of any systems level structured data store in either 
>> Tops-10 or Tops-20 with the exception of the Quasar failsoft file 
>> (QSRFSS, holds queue, print, batch requests across crashes).  I don't 
>> find this surprising; if you crash and corrupt a file with 
>> confuration information in it, a flat ASCII file is whaaay easier to 
>> recover than an specially engineered database.  The binary accounting 
>> and error files are sequential and don't count, IMHO.
>>
>> Under Tops-20, we used the following 'trick' for start-up speed and 
>> persisted configuration.  The configuration file was 'compiled' into 
>> binary and directly mapped into memory on start-up.
>>
>>  1. This was necessary for LPTSPL as it is started up for jobs, but
>>     shut down and put into a quiescent state when there is nothing
>>     left to print.  When you have a lot of printers, reparsing
>>     LPFORM.INI can be a real dog.  Very noticeable.
>>  2. I got the idea from the mailer, which does the same thing for
>>     mailing-list.txt
>>  3. The EXEC will also do it; you can restore a binary environment
>>     with all your special scripts really fast (like on PUSH or LOGIN)
>>  4. I had been thinking about doing this for the Extended Mode FTP
>>     server, but I'm not sure it's worth it.  I instrumented the start
>>     up time and it's in the milliseconds.  Probably would be
>>     necessary for a couple hundred simultaneous small requests.
>>
>> If I ever get truly serious about supporting Galaxy again, then 
>> probably I'll bite the bullet and put up Tops-10 so I can validate 
>> execution.
>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> On 3/10/20 9:25 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>>
>>> I've never used Tops-10 as an operator, so I can't answer most of 
>>> this, but one question I think I can...
>>>
>>> My understanding is that neither Tops-10, nor TOPS-20 have a 
>>> persistent database. Instead you need to have a script that does all 
>>> the definitions, and you need to run it at every boot. But I could 
>>> be confused about that one.
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> On 2020-03-11 01:50, Supratim Sanyal wrote:
>>>>
>>>> KLH-10 TOPS-10 noob questions:
>>>>
>>>> 1) At the TOPS-10 boot startup option prompt, I can type in CHANGE 
>>>> and then set the DECnet address. How do I make it persist across 
>>>> reboots and not have to do this every time?
> -- 
> Supratim Sanyal, W1XMT
> 39.19151 N, 77.23432 W
> QCOCAL::SANYAL via HECnet
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