[ih] Run TENEX in emulation?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Stephen Casner <casner at acm.org>

    > My motivation for this is one step removed.  I've been working on
    > ... 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.
    > ...
    > I wonder whether that archive might include the MACN11 and LINK11
    > programs that we used for the EPOS development.

If you can't find them, there may be another way.

When we first got the Port Expander software from SRI at MIT, we were using
what I assume were the tools SRI had been using to build systems - they
ran on the TOPS-20 machine, MIT-XX. (So they might be somewhere on an MIT
dump tape, but I have no idea how to get them.) The things you mention above
sound like the same tools?

What we eventually did was move MOS (don't recall about the rest of it,
without looking) to our Unix V6 system. Ward's group on the 4th floor had
gotten MACRO-11 running under UNIX quite some time before; it's actually DEC's
source code, tweaked for Unix, and seemed to do everything in the MACRO-11
manual. We didn't have a lot of trouble getting MOS to assemble under it, as I
recall.

They had also written a linker ('bind', in BCPL) that understood DEC's output
format, and supported multiple CSECT's, etc. So we were able to build systems
on the Unix machine.

(We later decided we wanted to be able to write code in C to run under MOS,
using Unix's existing C compiler. Phase 1 was to convert Unix a.out files to
the DEC object format, and use 'bind' to build systems; later we went the
other way, and converted to using a.out format, and the stock Unix linker,
'ld'.)

Anyway, if all your EPOS code is in MACRO-11, with no HLL, if you can't find
the original TENEX tools, maybe using UNIX would work for you too.

    Noel