[TUHS] 4.3 Wisc file transfer

[jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)]

    > From: Mary Ann Horton

    > What's the best way to transfer files in and out of the simh 4.3BSD Wisc
    > version?  I can do it with tape files, but it seems like FTP or ssh or
    > NFS ought to be possible, and none is behaving at first blush.

Someone should add the equivalent of Ersatz-11's 'DOS' device to SIMH; it's a
pseudo-device that can read files on the host filesystem. (Other stuff too,
but that's the relevant one here.) A short device driver in the emulated OS,
and a program to talk to it, and voila, getting a file into the emulated
system is a short one line command, none of this hassle with putting the bits
on a virtual tape, etc, etc.

I found editing files with 'ed' on my simulated V6 system painful (although i
still have the mental microcode to do it), so I did my editing under Windows
(Epsilon), and then read the file down to the Unix to compile it. Initially I
was doing it by putting the file on a raw virtual pack, and doing something
similar to that tape kludge. Then I got smart, and whipped up a driver for the
DOS device in Ersatz-11, and a program that used it, to allow me to easily
read a file from the Windows filesystem down to the Unix. Going around the
compile-debug-edit loop is totally painless now.

	Noel