[HECnet] A2RTR downtime

[Thomas DeBellis]

I wouldn't worry about it; I don't use VENTI all that much, either.  
…/Except/ when I do…  Then I have to tell you that it has proven to be 
positively invaluable and I am very grateful for that!

If this were critical, then I'd think about getting off my butt and 
putting up Tops-10 somewhere on one of my home systems.  But that would 
blow a lot of time; I haven't done a MONGEN since…well, I honestly can't 
remember—it's well over four decades and I never knew that part of it 
well to begin with.    Come to think of it, I might have been doing a 
ONCE and not a MONGEN.

Actually, having a guest account on other HECnet systems has also proved 
invaluable for chasing down arcane Tops-20 issues.  Thanks all!!

I reached out to Lars Brinkhoff concerning my Tops-10 patch and he said 
he would distribute wherever it made "sense" to do so.  If I get any 
feedback, I will forward it.  Otherwise, let me know if there is any way 
I can provide assistance.

Yes, it is a shame about the STOPCODE, but it would appear that the 
maintainer had some different ideas in the mid-1980's when this code was 
put in about what the usage of Tops-10 would be.  This comment is 
illustrative, the first sentence being key:

    _I doubt very much that the date itself has really gone past 2021_. 
    Probably someone smashed an AC or the routine to get the time from
    the monitor is returning junk. However, on November 9, 2021, it
    appears that many people will see this problem so prepare your SPR
    for that date.

I think the problem is that Tops-10 didn't have the kind of die-hard 
fanatics supporting it (read, MRC) that Tops-10 did, so stuff like this 
was caught and fixed years ago.  D36COM has an edit date of 2001 for 
this, but since it is from Gorin, it's probably older.

I continue to find Y2K things to clean up, these days mostly in the 
listings from various compilers and the remaining CUSP's that MRC didn't 
catch.

Another thing I fix are internal time of day comparisons.  This is 
stored as an unsigned 36 bit fixed fraction having resolution to about ⅓ 
of a second, 35 bits bringing you to 27-Sep-2217 20:00:00 EST US, the 
full 36 taking you to 7-Aug-2576 19:59:59 EST US.  Since the PDP-10 only 
has signed comparisons, all single comparison arithmetic will break in a 
mere 195 years.  Fixing that double word signed compares has given me 
some more breathing room.  In 554 years, I'm sure I'll have thought of 
something else…

> ****
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 10/18/21 11:19 AM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
>
> ***
>> *Second* is VENTI; I had wanted to test something on it and it 
>> doesn't appear to be online.
> *
>
> Sorry, I’m somewhat lazy about booting it up when the host system is 
> rebooted.  I don’t use VENTI that much.
>
> **
>
>> Had you had any interest in trying it?
>
> It sounds like I’m going to have to.  It’s a shame this STOPCODE was a 
> halt and not just a debug one; at least the latter would have allowed 
> the system to continue running.
>
> This also means I have to re-discover how to do a MONGEN and build.  
> There was a time, 30 years ago (actually, 40 years ago) when I could 
> have done it from memory but now I’ll have to read the manual again
>
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