[TUHS] Re: Running v7 in Open-SIMH - update for 2024

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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FYI - POR is to push some new tools I have been creating into OpenSIMH
shortly.

In fairness to Will, this is in the class of a "2-minute minor," not a
"4-minute major."  I back into this issue as I was working on Oscar's new
PiDP-10 and moving a very old (v6 syntax) UNIXC program that manipulates
PDP-10 backup and TOPS-20 Dumper images.  PDP-10s do things in 36 bits,
which does not map cleanly to the 8 data bits of a 9-track tape (you don't
want to know what the 10 does unless you have to deal with it).  So, I
wrote some tools to better examine and flexibly manipulate TAP files [the
debug code for tapes in SIMH is a bit of a mess].  Anyway, as I was testing
something, I thought I had made an error in my new tap_decode(1) tool when
I was looking at the v7.tap.gz file that Warren has in the TUHS archives
(that Will supplied/created with his mktape scripts).   When I looked more
carefully, it was missing a record. It turns out SIMH will silently
"attach" a TAP image without a proper 9-track logical end-of-tape (it
should give a warning).  It also turns out Will's directions never looked
for the actual 9-track EOT records - so nobody ever saw this.  I mentioned
it to him quietly - cudo's for coming clean.

FWIW: I always recommend Will's documents for V6 and V7 (in fact, we point
to them in the OpenSIMH archives at my suggestion).  The truth is, I wish
we had had access to a few more that are as good as Will's for some of the
other OSses.

Clem
ᐧ

On Thu, May 23, 2024 at 2:58 PM Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com> wrote:

> All,
>
> I can't believe it's been 9 years since I wrote up my original notes on
> getting Research Unix v7 running in SIMH. Crazy how time flies. Well, this
> past week Clem found a bug in my scripts that create tape images. It seem
> like they were missing a tape mark at the end. Not a showstopper by any
> means, but we like to keep a clean house. So, I applied his fixes and
> updated the scripts along with the resultant tape image and Warren has
> updated them in the archive:
>
> https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Keith_Bostic_v7/
>
> I've also updated the note to address the fixes, to use the latest version
> of Open-SIMH on Linux Mint 21.3 "Virginia" (my host of choice these days),
> and to bring the transcripts up to date:
>
>
> https://decuser.github.io/unix/research-unix/v7/2024/05/23/research-unix-v7-3.2.html
>
> Later,
>
> Will
>
>
>

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