Neater build process for JOTTO

PDP-10 / its

Incompatible Timesharing System

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Neater build process for JOTTO #799

Open atsampson opened 6 years ago

atsampson commented 6 years ago

build.tcl's process to dump TS JOTTO is messy because it expects to read its dictionary from a DECtape rather than DSK. It also doesn't open the TTY channels when started at BEG0.

One fix would be to make it read a single filename string, and open it with SOPEN. (This is roughly what SAIL did with their version.)

Alternatively, we could just make it read the dictionary file whenever it's started; this only takes a second or so under emulation.

larsbrinkhoff commented 6 years ago

Some random thoughts, not to be taken too seriously:

It would be possible to temporarily mount a DECtape when JOTTO is built. (An actual use case for DEtape!)
But since we entered the 70ies some time ago, it makes sense to read from disk.
Why SOPEN instead of OPEN? I believe SOPEN exists for the "long filenames" feature. To pass a file name string in a byte pointer? There's a library for parsing file names.
Old slow hardware may still exist, and new slow hardware is being built. :-)

larsbrinkhoff commented 6 years ago

Related to #789.

larsbrinkhoff commented 6 years ago

AIM-218: INFORMATION THEORY AND THE GAME OF JOTTO

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ai/aim/AIM-218.pdf

larsbrinkhoff commented 6 years ago

Some JOTTO files.

https://github.com/PDP-10/its-vault/commit/f991c0ef199b4793e6074cf161aec3dfa9722c2d

atsampson commented 6 years ago

AIM-218 is definitely describing the JOTTO program we have. Nice!

jotto.1 is a PDP-11 port of the code for DELPHI (this mentions "the M.I.T. Electrical Engineering Department's PDP-11/45 DELPHI system").

jotto.words, jotto.2 are dictionaries. jotto.alg is a fragment of an ALGOL implementation.

larsbrinkhoff commented 5 years ago

Another idea: Use a file name translation from UTn: to DSK: