Document installation, booting

[larsbrinkhoff]

The ITS machines were booted off paper tape.

On a clean machine, you used a MAGDMP paper tape.

It's a standalone program which transfers files between main memory and magtape.

To install the system, you use MAGDMP to load DDT and SALV.

SALV formats the disk(s) and loads files from another magtape written by DUMP.

To boot ITS, you use the DSKDMP paper tape.

Once DSKDMP is loaded, you use that to load ITS from disk into memory. Then you're in DDT and type $G to start.

[larsbrinkhoff]

Note: above is for KA10 and probably KL10.

KS10 is well documented in KSHACK; BUILD DOC.

[larsbrinkhoff]

@aap Is this what you wanted?

[aap]

Yes

[rcornwell]

If you want, someone can write a utility to write dskdmp to blocks 4-7 on the disk and we can disk boot into dskdmp. Or write it to block 0.

[eswenson1]

I don’t recall MC (KL-10) being booted from paper tape. Was it? ML, I believe, was. Don’t remember how AI or DM were booted.

[larsbrinkhoff]

I think I asked @cstacy somewhere, but I can't find it now. My vauge recollection is that all KAs were booted off paper tape. That is, if the DSKDMP boostrap in high memory is clobbered. Usually it would be untouched, in which case you could go to EDDT $U to go there.

Cold booting MIT-MC is described in AI WP 227, section 6.1. My previous remark about the KL booting was sloppy; of course it was booted from the PDP-11 front end.

[eswenson1]

Thanks, that’s what I remember. MC was “my” machine back then, and I never used paper tape. I always looked down my nose at the KAs for having such a primitive interface! :-)

On Jan 17, 2018, at 09:00, Lars Brinkhoff notifications@github.com wrote:

I think I asked @cstacy https://github.com/cstacy somewhere, but I can't find it now. My vauge recollection is that all KAs were booted off paper tape. That is, if the DSKDMP boostrap in high memory is clobbered. Usually it would be untouched, in which case you could go to EDDT $U to go there.

Cold booting MIT-MC is described in AI WP 227, section 6.1. My previous remark about the KL booting was sloppy; of course it was booted from the PDP-11 front end.

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[larsbrinkhoff]

David Moon wrote it well:

The procedure varied depending on the type of machine. You're probably most interested in the KS10 procedure, but that's the one I remember least well. In general, if starting from a totally cold machine but with good disk contents, one loaded a bootstrap from paper tape, magnetic tape, or disk depending on the type of machine (using read-in mode on a KA) [on a pdp-6 the bootstrap actually had to be keyed in from switches in the unlikely event that it had been wiped out of core memory]. The bootstrap loaded microcode (if a microcoded machine), then loaded a non-timesharing program (DSKDMP on some machines, exec DDT with file system capability on others), which could then be used to load an SBLK file containing a core image of ITS, SALV, and NTSDDT (exec DDT). Starting that program ($G in exec DDT, otherwise just pressing return) would run SALV to verify and repair the file system, then start ITS. If one didn't want to run time sharing one went into exec DDT first and patched one or two locations to control what should happen when ITS came up. You never start ITS without running SALV first, since it only takes a minute or less due to the small, compact, and simple file system (which I did NOT write in a weekend or any other length of time).

[larsbrinkhoff]

@eswenson1 mentioned documenting how to assemble ITS.

Maybe you can take something from here: https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/NITS.md

[eswenson1]

I had no clue that existed. Still, I like the idea of having it in info. So I may steal this and add to my INFO tree.