[ih] Run TENEX in emulation?

Stephen Casner casner at acm.org
Wed Feb 6 13:10:25 PST 2019


This message is addressed primarily to the BBN alumni out there.

The simh platform supports various PDP10 emulations (ITS, TOPS-10,
TOPS-20), but from what I have been able to determine so far, there is
no TENEX emuation.  I was told that an emulation of the TENEX pager
hardware was implemented but not much tested at this point.

Do any of you know whether an archive of TENEX software has been
saved?  If so, do you know whether it could be made available to
experimenters (considering any licensing restrictions that might still
be in force, etc.)?

My motivation for this is one step removed.  I've been working on
using the simh emulation of the PDP11 to run the EPOS operating system
for the PDP11 that we developed at ISI to support the ARPANET packet
speech work.  The EPOS system and application software was developed
on the TENEX systems at ISI.

Going a step further in the search, if there is an archive of software
from the BBN systems, I wonder whether that archive might include the
MACN11 and LINK11 programs that we used for the EPOS development.  I
know those programs were used at BBN because I worked with Ray
Tomlinson on extending the functionality of LINK11, which was written
in SAIL.

I have one binary build of EPOS that I have succeeded in running, and
I do have sources for EPOS, but no build tools.  Sadly, when I left
ISI I did not personally save as many files as I now wish I would
have, and ISI has not kept this history, either.

                                                        -- Steve



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