2 Feb
2001
2 Feb
'01
4:30 a.m.
This is a real stretch for my brain, but I seem to recall that the ";" that
appeared in ";login:" in the 1970s was sort-of "bleed-through" from an
escape sequence that was intended to do cursor positioning and/or screen-clearing on some
terminals... or something like that... therefore its absence would not necessarily be
significant on different hardware.
-Bill Mayhew, UNIX mangler emeritus
From: owner-pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
[mailto:owner-pups@minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au]On Behalf Of Carl Lowenstein
Sent: Thursday, February 01, 2001 12:35 PM
To: iking(a)microsoft.com
Cc: pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
Subject: RE: [pups] A bootable disk image for a PDP-11/34?
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From iking(a)microsoft.com Tue Jan 30 15:27 PST
2001
From: Ian King <iking(a)microsoft.com>
To: "'Ken Wellsch'" <kwellsch(a)tampabay.rr.com>om>,
Carl Lowenstein
<cdl(a)mpl.ucsd.edu>
Cc: pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
Subject: RE: [pups] A bootable disk image for a PDP-11/34?
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 14:38:15 -0800
Ken, I tried using that image and gunzip told me there was a crc error; it
wouldn't unzip it. (I downloaded it three times, just in case there was a
transmission error -- twice by ftp, once by http.) I've also tried the
"Dennis" images, which are supposedly straight RK05 images; E11 won't
boot
'em. One issue on which I'm not clear: where is the boot address? Stuff
at
loc 0 doesn't look like boot instructions.
If I could get an image to run in an emulator (as I mentioned, I'm running
E11 from DBit), I'd write some cheesy little loader to bring it down the
serial line (I already have it sketched out); but until I can at least get
one to boot in the emulator, I'm reluctant to spend the hours (at 9600
baud)
to spray it onto a disk. <sigh>
Well, as some response to this challenge "get an image to run in an
emulator",
I visited Bob Supnik's Computer History Simulation Project web page
<www.tiac.net/users/mps/retro/>
and followed the links to the sources for SIMH v2.5a and to the Unix V6
disk images.
I read the documentation file "simh_doc.txt", and compiled the
simulator. Then I read "simh_swre.txt", unpacked the V6 images, ran
the simulator and attached the three RK05 images to it, and booted
RK0. All according to the instructions.
I got the bootstrap prompt "@" to which I typed "unix" and it came
up
with a "login:" prompt, to which I could log in as root, and do things.
It's not quite the same V6 image that I remember from the olden days of
loading onto an 11/40 from magtape. The login prompt seems not to be
";login:" as we still see on the Usenix magazine. dmr's account seems
to have vanished but ken's is still there. And that's how I spent a
few hours last night.
In case it matters, the underlying hardware/software platform is an AMD
K6-3 running Mandrake 7.1 Linux.
carl
carl lowenstein marine physical lab u.c. san diego
{decvax|ucbvax} !ucsd!mpl!cdl cdl(a)mpl.ucsd.edu
clowenstein(a)ucsd.edu From Carl Lowenstein <cdl(a)mpl.ucsd.edu> Fri Feb
2 10:22:10 2001
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From: Carl Lowenstein <cdl(a)mpl.ucsd.edu>
Message-Id: <200102020022.QAA11849(a)chiton.ucsd.edu>
To: mayhew(a)altavista.com
Subject: Re: FW: [pups] A bootable disk image for a PDP-11/34?
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From mayhew(a)altavista.com Thu Feb 1 14:31 PST 2001
Date: 1 Feb 2001 14:30:43 -0800
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From: Bill Mayhew <mayhew(a)altavista.com>
Cc: pups(a)minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
Subject: Re: FW: [pups] A bootable disk image for a PDP-11/34?
This is a real stretch for my brain, but I seem to recall that the
";" that appeared in ";login:" in the 1970s was sort-of
"bleed-through"
from an escape sequence that was intended to do cursor positioning
and/or screen-clearing on some terminals... or something like that...
therefore its absence would not necessarily be significant on different
hardware.
Oh, yes. I was just hiding my previous knowledge. The ";" and ":"
in
the login prompt were the visible part of escape sequences to control a
Teletype KSR37. They didn't do anything useful on a VT05 but did show
up on the screen.
Unix Sixth Edition predates the common availability of even the dumbest
CRT terminals. There are still a lot of TTY37 control codes hanging
around in nroff output.
carl
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