[HECnet] TOPS-10 D-Day, DECnet failure on November 9th is less than six days away

[Thomas DeBellis]

Gerry,

Boy thanks for that response!!  You sure did knock some dust out of my mind!

I have seen part of this before; it's modifying the Tops-10 idle loop to 
notify the KLH10 micro-engine that there are no jobs that want to run.  
The modification is roughly equivalent to what was done to Tops-20.  
However, it should not be assumed that this is The Thing To Do on simh 
or other PDP-10's.

As I recall, simh does /not/ implement the Idler device.  I believe Bob 
Supnick's position was something along the lines of don't code to 
hardware which never existed and that the same effect of not loading the 
host could be achieved by snooping the PC.

MRC didn't agree at all and made some rather interesting arguments that 
KLH10 (and simh, for that matter), should be seen as legitimate PDP-10 
implementations.  MRC being MRC, he generalized the Idler to provide 
additional functionality which was not normally seen on a KL, a switch 
register and console lights.  Parts of the monitor were changed to be 
able to communicate status to Bob Armstrong's PANDA display.

I don't see why device address 700 would be any more or less risky than 
740.  As long is nothing else is sitting on the address, you're fine 
from what I can remember.

PS: Hey, you forgot TECO...
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 11/4/21 11:44 AM, G. wrote:
>
> 6. Open CLOCK1.MAC with any editor of your choice (SOS, EDIT, etc.) and
> modify it as follows:
>
>     Before:  SOJG   6,1     ;AC1 - DON'T CAUSE EXCESSIVE MEMORY 
> INTERFERENCE
>     After:   CONO   740,1   ;AC1 - DON'T CAUSE EXCESSIVE MEMORY 
> INTERFERENCE
>
> (I have removed some white space to fit either line in 78 characters)
>
> The address in the above CONO instruction must match the address of 
> the idler in the emulator configuration. Several online tutorials 
> suggest 700 but for some reason 740 should be a safer choice (I forgot 
> the specifics, nonetheless some post in alt.sys.pdp10 may have some 
> explanation) 
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