From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: at258@osfn.org (Merle K. Peirce) Date: Sun, 4 Mar 2001 18:27:31 -0500 (EST) Subject: [pups] Re: Us vs. Museums In-Reply-To: <983720634.3aa262babe633@email.ou.edu> Message-ID: Uhhh... do you really have to ask... Why can't you execute the paper work for a non-profit yourself? In RI, it's $35. M. K. Peirce Rhode Island Computer Museum Shady Lea, Rhode Island "Casta est quam nemo rogavit." -Ovid On Sun, 4 Mar 2001, Jeffrey S. Sharp wrote: > I don't know everyone's perspective on this issue, and it would be good to hear > some alternate viewpoints. Basically, I am against people giving classic > computers in working condition to museums. Instead, I believe that they should > donate or sell their machines to enthusiasts who will play with them and learn > things. > > A while back, I ran across a person that had some hardware I wanted. He was > torn between selling it to me and giving it to a museum. I didn't have a lot > of money available to give him, and donation to a museum (a nonprofit) would > get him an impressive tax deduction. I did some research about what it takes > to start a nonprofit organization, but it looked too expensive (lawyers) and > time-consuming to be a viable option for me. I sent the following argument to > him: > > > While I would love to establish a collection of these machines, > > I'm definitely not a 'collector' as the term has come to mean > > today; I'm not in it to get something rare, to make money, or > > to have some pretty decorations in my house. While it would > > certainly be nice to have a pretty system, my priority is to > > get something that I can learn with. I want to *run* these > > machines. I want to *explore* these machines. I want to *hack* > > on these machines, to see what unexpected things they can be > > coerced into doing. I want to get as close as I can to the > > *experience* of computing in these machines' era. If these > > machines go to a museum, they're just pretty art, and they will > > educate _no_one_. They will sit behind glass walls, no one > > ever will touch them again, and no one will ever turn them on or > > keep them in working order. They are effectively lost. That's > > little better then scrapping them, and you _KNOW_ how you feel > > about that! > > What do you think about this? > > (BTW, if anyone wants to use the quoted paragraph, they are free to) > > -- > Jeffrey S. Sharp > jss at ou.edu > > -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- > Version 3.12 > GCS/MU d-@ s-:+ a-- C+++(++++) UB+++$> P+ L+(++) E> > W++ N+(++) o? K? w++$ !O M(-) !V PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ > 5 X(+) R++ tv+ b+ DI++(+++) D+ G++ e> h--- r+++ y+++ > ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------ > Received: (from major at localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) id LAA07824 for pups-liszt; Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:58:48 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from owner-pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au) Received: from henry.cs.adfa.edu.au (henry.cs.adfa.edu.au [131.236.21.158]) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA07820 for ; Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:58:46 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from wkt at henry.cs.adfa.edu.au) Received: (from wkt at localhost) by henry.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.11.2/8.9.3) id f250sJB23189 for pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au; Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:54:19 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from wkt) From: Warren Toomey Message-Id: <200103050054.f250sJB23189 at henry.cs.adfa.edu.au> Subject: [pups] Some more PDP-11 UNIX Geneaology To: PDP-11 Unix Preservation Society Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:54:19 +1100 (EST) Reply-To: wkt at cs.adfa.edu.au X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL68 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au Precedence: bulk All, Just received this from Heinz Lycklama, the creator of Mini-UNIX and who worked on the floor below Ken and Dennis. It's some interesting details of some of the offshoots of Research UNIX. ----- Forwarded message from Heinz Lycklama ----- From: Heinz Lycklama To: Warren Toomey Subject: Re: Genealogy of Mini UNIX? Warren, I was checking thru my email and noticed that I never really answered your questions on the history of UNIX. Just noticed your web site with some of the information. I do not have any UNIX source code in my possession - LSX, Mini-UNIX, MERT or SPS [all described in the BSTJ July/August 1978 edition.] However, I can fill in some of the gaps for you. Here they are: LSX, also known as LSI-UNIX was developed for the first microprocessor produced by DEC - the LSI-11. The whole system ran in 20Kbytes of memory [NOT MB] with the OS in the first 8K and the user program swapping in and out of the upper 12K. More memory could be added, but it really ran in this amount of memory. I used one floppy disk (256KB) for the system boot and system programs, and a second floppy disk (256KB) for user programs and data. My motivation for producing this scaled-down UNIX system was for use in the lab for controlling special test and new equipment. It was portable and was used to control a music synthesizer developed by Hal Alles [one of my Bell Labs colleagues.] To get the system to fit in the small memory footprint, I stripped it of all non-essentials. Groups were not supported, and pipes were supported in "user" space. By this I mean I changed the shell to recognize "|" and turn it into "> temp1; < temp1" and then remove the temporary files at the end of the shell command. I worked with Dennis Ritchie to reduce some of the table sizes in the C compiler, and even yacc and lex, so that all of these programs could run under LSX. The LSX system was typically configured to use one system floppy and one user floppy. LSX could even be used to recompile itself - it was self-sustaining. User programs were swapped into memory above 8K bytes. The LSX system was added to within Bell Labs by a number of researchers who had different floppy drivers and/or needed to support different peripherals. The system was produced in the summer of 1974 and found much use within Bell Labs. If only Western Electric [the precursor of Lucent, and licensor of the UNIX system] had found a way to offer binary licenses for the UNIX system back then, the UNIX system would be running on all PC's today rather than DOS/Windows. We may be given a second chance with Linux! Mini-UNIX was developed by myself when a number of people came to me and said that they wanted to be able to use their PDP11/10 computers in the lab to run UNIX programs. These computers had no memory management unit (MMU) and therefore could not run unmodified UNIX kernels of the day. I took on this project during the fall of 1974 while teaching a number of Explorer Scouts about the UNIX system and computing in general in the evening. My starting point was LSX because it had already been modified to run without an MMU. This system ran in 12Kbytes and used 16Kbytes for user programs. I used many of the same tricks to get Mini-UNIX to run on PDP11 computers without an MMU as I used to get LSX to run on the LSI-11 microcomputer. Although I left the support for groups in (as I recall.) After all, I had 4Kbytes more to work with. These systems would support one or more RK05 disks with 2.5Mbytes of disk each. The Mini-UNIX system was licensed to many different Universities and studied and modified by many students and their professors. I've even heard of some who took Mini-UNIX and made modifications to make it work on an LSI-11 microcomputer. The Mini-UNIX system was developed over a period of a few months, making system changes and recompiling the system in the evening while I was also teaching Explorer Scouts about UNIX and computing. The compiles took a long time - so I was able to "kill two birds with one stone" so to speak. The MERT system was designed and implemented by Doug Bayer and myself at Bell Labs, mostly in the time frame from 1972 to 1976, when the PDP11/45 computer was first introduced. It was the first computer that supported kernel, supervisor and user address spaces. We need all three spaces so that we could support multiple computing environments (supervisors) and still support real-time tasks. We concentrated on doing the UNIX system supervisor first but later on we also added support for RSX-11D, DEC's real-time operating system at the time. It was a very large undertaking and took us a number of years to accomplish. There was a need for real-time operating systems in the development parts of Bell Labs and we soon picked up real customers for the MERT system. I remember that during the early years, before we had any customers, we were encouraged by Ken Thompson to continue the work. He also saw the need. The MERT system was eventually used by a number of Bell Labs customers at all of the major Bell Labs locations. It was even used as the basis of a fault-resilient switching system, called duplexing MERT, or DMERT. Later yet, the key real-time features of the MERT system were incorporated into later versions of the main UNIX operating system. SPS, the Satellite Processor System, was developed by Carl Christensen and myself. We developed it to satisfy a need to tie many of our mini- and microcomputers in the lab together, and to be able to use the familiar UNIX system and tools to develop distributed applications for use in the lab. What we did was basically was enable "UNIX programs" to run on mini-computers in the lab as if the programs were developed on run on a full UNIX system. Whenever the program made a "system call", we trapped it and sent the system call number and parameters to a UNIX program running on the host computer. The host computer executed the system call on behalf of the program running in the Satellite Processor and returned the results back to it. This was a great productivity tool for many people developing lab applications at various Bell Labs locations. The system was widely distributed within the Bell System. Heinz Lycklama ----- End of forwarded message from Heinz Lycklama ----- Received: (from major at localhost) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) id DAA12547 for pups-liszt; Tue, 6 Mar 2001 03:56:58 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from owner-pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au) Received: from goby.ciswired.com (IDENT:root at goby.ciswired.com [206.97.67.65]) by minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id DAA12543 for ; Tue, 6 Mar 2001 03:56:51 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from greg at ciswired.com) Received: from weasel.ciswired.com (root at weasel.ciswired.com [206.97.67.73]) by goby.ciswired.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id LAA04672 for ; Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:44:04 -0500 Received: from localhost (greg at localhost) by weasel.ciswired.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA28897 for ; Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:52:17 -0500 X-Authentication-Warning: weasel.ciswired.com: greg owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 11:52:16 -0500 (EST) From: "Gregory R. Travis" To: pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au Subject: [pups] Parts sources, etc. Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-pups at minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au Precedence: bulk Hello all, Some background: I recently acquired a lot of PDP-11 equipment at an auction which I will be refurbishing it and adding it to my computer museum. Basically what I got was the following: 1 gutted 11/44 with a full CPU set, 1 operating 11/44, 1 operating 11/83, several BA11 expansion boxes, 3 RA81 disks, 3 RL02 disks, etc. My first plan is to build a big 11/44 system running 2.11BSD using an RL02 for the root, an RA81 for /usr, swap, and a bootable spare root, and another RA81 for a home file system. Questions: I need sources for the following, can anyone suggest good starting points? 1. Unit select plugs for the RL02s. All the plugs I have are "0", I'd like to be able to use more than one RL02 on the system if need be. 2. Peanut lamps for the RL02s and RA81s. I assume they're the same lamp for both drives. These are the lamps that go behind the front-panel switches and indicators (e.g. Load/Ready/Write Protect/etc.) I pulled one lamp and it was marked CM73ENG. A search on Goodle for this pulls up nothing. 3. New, or good substitutes, for the coarse air filters used behind the 11/44 front panel as well as behind the RA81 front panels. The ones that I have are literally crumbling apart. 4. Sources for the rubber/metal motor-mount bushings used on the RA81 drive motors. Many of mine have torn. 5. Sources for drive belts for the RL02s/RA81s 6. Sources for fine filters (cartridges) used on the RL02s. 7. Sources for RL02 disk packs (I have only 2 packs for the three drives!) The working 11/44 I got is an interesting beast. It appears to have been supplemented with at least one, possibly two, BA11 expansion boxes. The last BA11 looks like it further fed into a QBUS expansion box via a DW11-B (M9403 - not on the module list) UNIBUS->QBUS converter. The thing was loaded. Thanks, greg Gregory Travis Cornerstone Information Systems ATS greg at ciswired.com 812 330 4361 ext. 18