User:Thor

Thor Halbert

Very into Retrocomputing, started programming in High School in about '75, so have seen a bit since...

• 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: Assember (loved Macro-10), Algol, Fortran, Basic, SNOBOL, LISP
• 79-80 - DecSystem-20 (not sure what version -- have to dig through some old printouts I have) - Tektronic 4010 programming - Pascal, Macro-20, minor exposure to MIDAS, SAIL, and APL.
• 78-81 MITS Altair Extended Disk Basic Business machine with two reasonably large hard drives -- LA-180
• Second Jobs: 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 (03/24/34/40/44/70). 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 Atmospheric 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
• 2006-Present - Mostly .NET shop -- a bit of Mono - Linux, FreeBSD.

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Side projects:

• 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. 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.
• 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).
• 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 into c#. 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. 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'm quite good at metaprogramming - writing languages which generate code -- the JSYS and CALLI interfaces can probably be autogenerated with a sufficiently complex specification.
• 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?

--- Vintage Equipment

• 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 S-100 machine - 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
• TK50? (Weird little serial tape drive-TK50's not right --I'll have to look it up)

Manuals

• 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
• 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).

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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