[HECnet] RSX or RSTS

[Paul Koning]

> On Mar 21, 2020, at 1:38 PM, John H. Reinhardt <johnhreinhardt at thereinhardts.org> wrote:
> 
> On 3/20/2020 10:23 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
>>   Oh, and there's also the question of what's available in terms of
>> installation media for either OS.  I'd want the most recent version I could
>> find, and hopefully something Y2K compliant so I don't have to fudge the
>> system date.  And it has to have DECnet, so it can be on HECnet, of course.
>> And whatever languages are available.
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
> For RSTS/E you can find a lot at Brett Bump's RSTS.ORG site.
> 
> 
> Downloads in general: <http://www.rsts.org/autoindex.php?dir=distros>
> 
>   RSTS/E specific:
> 
>     PRe-made disks: <http://www.rsts.org/autoindex.php?dir=distros/RSTS_disks/>
> 
> Pre-Genned for SimH or E11: <http://www.rsts.org/autoindex.php?dir=distros/RSTS_kits/>
> 
>     Distribution tape images: <http://www.rsts.org/autoindex.php?dir=distros/RSTS_tapes/>
> 
> 
> I'm not sure if he's applied any Y2K patches to any of the later V9, V10) kits.

V10.1 is Y2K compliant out of the box.  (Nearly so, at least; DECnet has some small glitches.)  V9.6 isn't Y2K compliant, I don't know if patches exist for it.

On some of the earlier comments and questions: RSTS includes both RSX and RT11 emulation.  In both cases, this is the non-realtime subset, but it means that applications generally work.  RT11 emulation has been there since V5B, when it was added as the way SYSGEN is done.  RSX emulation came not much later.  Many of the programming languages are essentially the RSX products, either unmodified or slightly tweaked.  Basic-Plus-2, Cobol, etc...

TECO, of course, that too has been around since V5.

V9 added limited support for asynchronous I/O with ASTs, on disks and on TMSCP and TS11 tape drives.  That was done to make the new fast BACKUP tool go fast on streaming tape drives.  

DCL: Around V9 this became a serious tool, and somewhere around that time it became the default command interface.  It supports many of the same features as VMS, including various "programming" features like conditionals, loops, string variables and functions, etc.  Some have different names to match BASIC, so you can't quite take a VMS command file and just run it, but they are "culturally compatible".

Also starting in V9, DCL support includes indirect command files with output logging, done for the "batch" feature but generally available.  It's actually done in the kernel, which is some interesting magic.  You can log your interactive session to a log file, with time stamps on each output line if you want.

BACKUP: the V9 version is a subset of the VMS program.  It writes backupsets that VMS can read, and it can read VMS backup sets with some limitations.  Block size limit is smaller, I think, and there are some considerations for directory names since RSTS doesn't have names.

File systems: Steve is right, RT11 is the universal format.  Or tapes, of course.  There is one other option: Fred Knight's RSTSFLX tool for VMS, if you can find a copy, will read (and perhaps write, I forgot) RSTS disks.  My rstsflx tool (V2 in C, V3 in Python) was inspired by that.  You can probably compile my rstsflx v2 on VMS and use that instead of Fred's program.

Programming languages: there's DECUS ALGOL, similar to Burroughs extended ALGOL.  I need to exhume the sources for that.  And part of the V10 kit, as "unsupported" is FORTH, including a RSTS crash dump interactive analyzer (called SDA after the VMS example) written in Forth.

	paul