[HECnet] Younger generations

[Keith Halewood]

Hi Thomas,

I should have been more explicit. The competition is an internal company (my day job), one of many to keep us all sane while working from home continually. We’ve had various arty ones from “appreciating Picasso” to the more technical ones. There has been a lot of raspberry-pi related rivalry with robotics and general real-world controlling to more software development type activities. Mine falls into the latter category. Most of us techy types in the company have quite a few Pi’s knocking about. There are some 40 of various types here at home, some of which are doing a little bit more than acting as convenient linux command lines. I might have preferred VMS on a SIMH VAX but I don’t feel comfortable with passing about licence paks even though they end in 2022.

Hence the ‘getting Panda on klh10 on a Pi’ of which I already have one on hecnet: WALLACH (29.108).
DECnet works for my purposes (obviously) as does LAT and enough of TCP/IP to keep me happy.
I do have a dedicated Ethernet adaptor for KLH10 – it’s a TAP device bridged to a real Ethernet device which is shared with the host and some SIMH instances.

There are a few ‘tasks’ around simple discovery and seeing what ‘real’ Zork looks like and so forth.

Most of those interested are in their 30s and 40s. It’s possible we could coerce an intern into having a go. I could also introduce a soft option of logging into WALACH and taking it from there.

Keith


From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Thomas DeBellis
Sent: 22 April 2021 15:58
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Younger generations


Could you elaborate on this?  I was unaware of any such competition (which, of course, means absolutely nothing).  I had been looking at the new 8 GB Raspberry PI model, which I believe would be a better fit for installations that aggressively leverage extended mode (a number of my rewrites do).  It would also run a possible extended-extended KLH (+22 bits) that I have been investigating.

What is it about the Pi (or the OS running on it) that precludes KLH10?  I have KLH10 running on an old version of CentOS (6.4) in a 32 bit compile.  I also have it running on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS in a 64 bit compile.  I had to do some tweaking to get it the build nicely (I.E., to eliminate a lot of compiler whining).

I have been working PANDA for a very long time; MRC took all of my patches while he was alive, but obviously that isn't happening any more.

A few things off the top of my head.  DECnet won't work very well out of the box for a number of reasons, and depending on the speed of the Pi SSD, a bug can get tickled that will hang Tops-20.  The directions for setting up DECnet under HECnet need to get written.  For example, as far as I am aware, no Tops-20 hosts except mine are doing regular host updates.  The DECnet version of SMTP is broken.  Multi-forking FAL is not debuggable.  Anonymous FAL is access not supported.

DECnet itself won't work because osdnet.c doesn't set some things properly (like AllMulti), but there are other problems as well.

It really makes your life easier to have a separate Ethernet adapter dedicated to KLH10.  DECnet would be possible, but difficult without it, but other things are easier, too.  I did a shared adapter for a month or so back in 2002 and got a 2nd adapter shortly afterwards.  That was years before I had even heard of HECnet.
On 4/21/21 2:17 PM, Keith Halewood wrote:

I’m not trying to jinx it, but there’s a competition I’ve started which is effectively get KLh10 running on a raspberry pi, panda tops-20 and first to get it so that I can run an MDL program on it wins... or something.



On 21 Apr 2021, at 19:14, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com><mailto:mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:



On 4/21/21 2:12 PM, Keith Halewood wrote:

With what was going on about RT11, I showed a much younger colleague some of the conversations on this list.



Let’s just say that I fear for the future of the human race.



 I share your concern.  Why don't you try to get him interested in the

vintage stuff?  At LSSM, we've found that a great many of the younger

folks actually do get interested, when they take the time to see just

how cool things used to be...which usually translates to "when someone

like us takes the time to show them".



 We've also found that many younger folk appreciate the elegant

simplicity (relatively speaking) of vintage systems.



             -Dave



--

Dave McGuire, AK4HZ

New Kensington, PA
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