User:Thor

Thor Halbert

Very into Retrocomputing, started programming in High School in about '75, so have seen a bit since... Back when the machines had souls...

---Work/School

• High School 75-79 - PDP-10 KA10 TOPs-10 5.07 (this was the Albuquerque Public Schools system, so coincidentally was one of the machines that Bill Gates and Paul Allen rented time from to work on MITS Basic. I learned: Assembler (loved Macro-10), DDT, Algol, Fortran, Basic, SNOBOL, LISP, TECO. I mostly worked in assembler.
• 79-80 - DecSystem-20 (not sure what version -- have to dig through some old printouts I have) - Tektronix 4010 programming - Pascal, Macro-20, minor exposure to MIDAS, SAIL, and APL. Used Emacs (TECO version) for the first time.
• 78-81 MITS Altair Extended Disk Basic Business machine with two reasonably large hard drives -- LA-180
• 1980 Basic software development on Apple II + - got some exposure to Flex-9 operating system on SWTPC machines. First actual "Winchester" brand hard-drive.
• 1980-1985 - DEC PDP-11 Shop. Lots of different species of PDP-11's (04/24/34/40/44/70). RT-11 (V3, 4 & 5), RSTS/E (mostly production is later V7s, but got exposure to 8 and the new DCL shell). A bit of Ultrix, RSX-11 MUMPS. Programmed primarily in DIBOL and Basic-Plus. Learned C for the first time with the PDP-11 C Language C tape for RSTS/E. Did a bit of programming in random Basics - Fortran, SPSS, just a bit of Macro-11.
• 85-2001 - Initially DEC shop - PDP-11's running BSD 2.9. Then large crop of small Vaxen -- mostly MicroVAX-II's in a VMS VAXCluster with early Ethernet on DECnet. System was a member of SPAN (Space Physics Analysis Network) -- at the time the largest "Internet" if it's kind -- but it was DECnet based. Shop then shifted to Suns -- early SUN3's with SUNOS then into the Sparcs running solaris. Started running FreeBSD. Most all programming is lots of different generations of C.
• 2001-2006 - Consultant (I'm an Enterprise Architect) - Globetrotter...
• 2006-Present - Mostly .NET shop -- a bit of Mono - Linux, FreeBSD. Grounded in Seattle nowadays -- soaking up the rain and the coffee...

---Hobby projects (some moneymaking, most not):

• 86ish - Built a special card for the Apple IIe called the promverter which permitted a user to switch between the default set of keyboard and screen font proms with another set. We originally sold Navajo, Hopi, Turkish and Russian. We sold several of these to the southwest tribes and one group started on a Navajo dictionary. I think we sold about 200 units. Eventually had a unit with a rotary switch which could hold several. Also included printer fonts for a couple of random printers (Epson and Imagewriter)
• 88-92 - Did tons of development on the Commodore Amiga -- wrote the Commercial CAD system UltraDesign in C (by myself as the programmer and two others as testers and documenters --- those were the days).
• 96-2004 - Owned and ran an ISP - First $20 a month in Albuquerque - one of the first 56k providers and DSL. All FreeBSD shop. Made day jobs for a few friends, but not myself -- oh well...
• 2001-2002 - Started on a CPU emulator for the PDP-10 in C. Kind of aborted this work when the fine SIMH came out. Mine had an interesting architecture with a cross-bar table which contained a pointer to a function for each CPU instruction instead of the giant case statement in SIMH. Wrote a very rudimentary assembler (very simplified macro syntax) for writing tests. Had an idea which I started, but never got too far for an OS emulator (since I had a lot of the user mode system done except for floating point -- but no I/O). SIMH and KLH10 worked great, so I thought I'd go another way and start taking the OSen apart--something like WINE.
• 2008 - Keep a couple of SIMH systems running -- two PDP-10 systems - one with TOPS-10 and the other with the PANDA version of Tops-20 (on KLH10). Trying to put together a RSTS/E system - got a 8.4 system up. Trying to run latest 9, but seems like every time I would build it, sysgen and reboot, the disk would become corrupted. Trying to put together a DECNet system with LAT, but only that latest version of Decnet supported ethernet. Need to get the hobbyist VMS stuff from HP.
• 2008-2009 PDPVM - Worked on porting SIMH PDP-10 base CPU into c#. I really only need the user-mode CPU, not any of the I/O. Wanted to work more on the TOPS-10/TOPS-20 OS Emulator. I want to put together a system that can run TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 executables at the command line (in cygwin or freebsd/linux). I think it would be much easier to write an OS emulator in a real OO language like C#. Even though I worked primarily in C for almost 30 years--I've totally fallen in love with C#. Only pain is that C# doesn't have octal :/. I'm also quite good at metaprogramming - writing languages which generate code (which C# is really good at supporting) -- the JSYS and CALLI interfaces can probably be autogenerated with a sufficiently complex specification. This is still ongoing. Need to finish the CPU and get so I can run most of the early diagnostics (this is how I developed the C emulator -- nice to essentially have some unit tests). Then I need to figure out what OS to do first. I've thought to get the 20 running and then make it run the pa1040.exe emulator on the 20. But I'd really like to do both separately. I got bogged down on the FILOP operations in C the first time around. I just ran MACRO and started emulating each CALLI I ran across in order (order of needed them). I have lots of tools I wrote load .SAV and .EXE files into memory that I can port. I'd also thought of the possibility of doing this whole user-mode emulator for RT-11, RSTS/E and RSX (of course we don't have sources to these--for the kernel anyway).
• 2009 - I've also been getting into 3D environments so I've thought of doing full on 3D models of my favorite old machines. I have even thought of doing them up in XNA or MOGRE with full 3D sound with a running SIMH emulator inside the simulation. How about some games with fully working PDP's in them? Finding sounds will be hard. Fans and Transformers are reasonably easy, but tape drives and dot matrix printers will be hard. Smells are impossible. Going to a data center in Beijing and hearing all of the transformers sing at the wrong frequency (50hz instead of 60hz) is something most people wouldn't get. You don't really hear them anymore -- it's just the fans.
• Recently got accounts on Paul Allen's real PDP-10 and 20 (20 runs on the TOAD box I think).
• Had always mused about doing a subversion repository for the TOPSs-10 and 20 sources -- check in all of the various versions through time to rebuild the whole history.
• Today I started trying to get the latest SIMH PDP-10 to build in Visual Studio 2008 for Windows CE. I do a bunch of C# devo for windows CE so thought that would be fun. I'd like to be able to run the PDP-10 on my cellphone. My environment isn't quite right for CE C++ for some reason. Ah well...

---Vintage Equipment I Own

• Apple IIe - original monitor and 2 disk drives
• Amiga 1000 - lots of random hardware
• Amiga 500
• PDT-11/150 - I used to have a VT-52 to go with it bit not anymore.
• SWTPC 6800 and some other S-100 machine (FutureData?) - I think I have a bunch of weird scrap, but not sure what condition it's in
• 4 Random Pen plotters
• DEC 20milliamp serial paper tape reader
• TU-58 (Weird little serial tape drive)
• I have most of the boards for an 11/24. I don't have the backplane or case (though I do have a unibus section and the prints, but I'm not insane enough to want to do all that wirewrap by hand).
• I have lots of boards from MicroVAX-IIs including a couple of CPUs and a lot of 3rd party disk/tape cards from emulex and dilog. And some memory cards. No chassis.
• I have the following tape drives (which should all still work on linux/freebsd scsi): Exabyte 2.2gb 8m drives, Archive QIC-125 and QIC-150 (I used to use these for Amiga backups), and a couple of early DAT drives. I'm about to set up a rig to salvage all of the old tapes I have (suns, amigas, and old freebsd backups). Like I mention below -- I had loads of TK50s with VMS stuff and lots of 9-Tracks with RSTS stuff that I let go without salvaging. "Umm - honey, why don't you clean out that closet?" - Arg!
• I do still have a notebook full of VMS license keys

---Manuals (Physical Books)

• Lots of PDP-10, PDP-11, and VAX manuals. I'll have to inventory them. There are probably several that I have that aren't in the Bitsavers collection. I'll have to get them scanned for the cause.
• Lots of DECUS pubs.
• RSTS/E manuals (mostly 7.x vintage)
• DIBOL Manuals
• Pretty complete RT-11 V4 manual set
• Random VAX Manuals.
• Early MITS Altair manual
• Not too many Dec-20 books, though I have a 20 Monitor calls book
• I also have a lovingly worn out TOPS-10 Monitor Calls manual which I used through high school--with handwritten notes, which was irritatingly much newer than the OS that my high school had (they had a KA-10, so were pretty much limited to 5.07B). I have a lot of other TOPS-10 manuals like macro (user books).
• I have a pretty good set of printer manuals for the VT100, VT125 and a couple of others.
• I have a lot of random prints -- mostly for PDP-11s. I think I have a full set for my little PDT-11/150.
• TODO: Detailed inventory of above

---As for this site:

• Have a rather large number of pictures I've collected on the net. I don't have any way to really judge the copyright provenance of any of them. I do intend to do the 3D modeling and such like I did for the 1170 front panel, which would then pretty much be my original art. Of course, there are only a few interesting consoles on the DEC machines (for PDP-10s and PDP-11s) -- like for the PDP-11 35/40/KL Console, the 45 and maybe the 55/60. The later machines -- the 44/84/94 and the qbus machines are all rather dull externally. The KA-10/KI-10 are interesting, though I don't have any great pictures or high-resolution diagrams of them. Also there are lots of indicators on several of the memory cabinets and such. I still want to model many of these. The big vaxen might be interesting. I met a 9000 once (in Italy). Still, I'd like to model all of the boxes. I've been doing graphics for 30 years, but haven't used any of the modern tools much. Trying to get my daughters into 3D modeling (they're 16), so we're learning together -- looking at Sketchup, Maya, and Blender.

• I can write articles...

---

Kind of feels like writing a resume :)

Too many boxes of old tapes from the PDP-11 and the VAX went into the Recycle -- had no idea the emulators would come along. So sad. I can emulate my old computers, but can't emulate any of my own old stuff. I do have some old printouts of lots of code....

---Thor