04-Jan-1999 22:51:19 -0800,2462;000000000000

04-Jan-1999 22:51:19 -0800,2462;000000000000
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Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 12:17:26 -0500 (EST)
From: Ken Rossman - NYC SE <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Subject: Re: R.I.P. PANDA:

> > can actually interpret a DUMPER tape (or any other archaic software
> > format) is increasingly difficult. And the DUMPER format is pretty
> > trivial.
>
> The people at the computer center at Columbia University had written such a
> tool (any of you guys on this list?). If there is interest, I will try
> contacting them about releasing the source.

If this is the tool I'm thinking of, that was work I did, and it was NOT
originally my code. I merely took the code from a program called "read20",
by Jay Lepreau. I just tried to put a Columbia C COMND Jsys emulation
package wrapper around it (and sort of broke the code somewhat in the
process -- it works, but not like it ought to).

Look for "read20" out on the net somewhere. I still have some old source
code lying around too if anyone wants it. Worked OK for most tapes, though
you will likely have to do your own ANSI label processing independently of
what read20 does if you have labelled DUMPER tapes.

Ken Rossman, NYC SE 212-558-9182 || 212-558-9329 (FAX)
Sun Microsystems Email: [email protected]
One New York Plaza, 35th Fl. SUN Internal: http://noho.East/~rossman
New York, NY 10004 INTERNET: http://www.columbia.edu/~rossman

21-Jan-1999 13:47:00 -0800,1491;000000000000
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Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 13:46:40 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
To: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
Subject: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Organization: Pandamonium Reigns
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TOIL (Ten On an Intel Laptop) is no longer a joke; it is reality.

I finally bought a PC notebook (an NEC 120LT, a 100MHz Pentium-class CPU
with 32MB RAM and 2GB hard drive for $1000), and spent a couple of hours
porting the PDP-10 emulator (an old, KS-only, version of klh10) to Windows
98. It was surprisingly easy, once I found the Windows console routines.

It runs TOPS-20 at about twice the speed of a real 2020. This is without
any tuning; among other things I'm using POSIX calls. I think that I/O
(especially console I/O) would run much better using native Windows calls.

-- Mark --

* RCW 19.149 notice: This email address is located in Washington State. *
* Unsolicited commercial email may be billed $500 per message. *
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

22-Jan-1999 20:31:54 -0800,1388;000000000000
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Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 18:26:10 -0500
From: shsrms <[email protected]>
Organization: The tinker and the herbalist
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Mark Crispin wrote:
>
> TOIL (Ten On an Intel Laptop) is no longer a joke; it is reality.
Thanks Mark,
now...how do some of us get our grubby little paws on it....
Hmmm
I guess I might have to buy an intel ....
bob

--
real address is shsrms at erols dot com
The Herbal Gypsy and the Tinker.

22-Jan-1999 20:32:05 -0800,1949;000000000000
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Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 12:37:47 +0000 (GMT)
From: Colin Bruce <[email protected]>
To: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
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On Thu, 21 Jan 1999, Mark Crispin wrote:

> TOIL (Ten On an Intel Laptop) is no longer a joke; it is reality.
>
> I finally bought a PC notebook (an NEC 120LT, a 100MHz Pentium-class CPU
> with 32MB RAM and 2GB hard drive for $1000), and spent a couple of hours
> porting the PDP-10 emulator (an old, KS-only, version of klh10) to Windows
> 98. It was surprisingly easy, once I found the Windows console routines.
>
> It runs TOPS-20 at about twice the speed of a real 2020. This is without
> any tuning; among other things I'm using POSIX calls. I think that I/O
> (especially console I/O) would run much better using native Windows calls.

Dear All,

Over the last few years several people have mentioned PDP-10 emulators
but I've never been able to find one. Are they commercial only? Is such
a thing available anywhere? I miss my old DECSYSTEM-20 (MR2172) so much
and would love to see the @ prompt once more and be able to do SYSTATs etc.

Best wishes....
Colin

22-Jan-1999 20:32:14 -0800,1861;000000000000
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Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 10:52:51 -0500
From: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!

But Mark! You wouldn't have had to do the porting work if you put
a real operating system on your new laptop. Dump Windoze (or at
least split the partition with FIPS) and put Linux up. Then
you'll have all the good stuff. I have Redhat 5.1 running on an
IBM laptop. It supports pcmcia, including my modem and ethernet
cards, and I even run the XFree86 server on the 800x600 display.

This is now to make a laptop really useful!

I have to say, TOPS-20 was the best in its day, but the world has
moved on. GNU/Linux is a very worthy successor. Don't leave home
(or stay home) without it.

dlm

=====================

Mark Crispin <[email protected]> writes:

> TOIL (Ten On an Intel Laptop) is no longer a joke; it is reality.

> I finally bought a PC notebook (an NEC 120LT, a 100MHz Pentium-class CPU
> with 32MB RAM and 2GB hard drive for $1000), and spent a couple of hours
> porting the PDP-10 emulator (an old, KS-only, version of klh10) to Windows
> 98. It was surprisingly easy, once I found the Windows console routines.

22-Jan-1999 21:31:52 -0800,1246;000000000000
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Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 20:43:31 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
To: Colin Bruce <[email protected]>
cc: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.91.990122123235.31102C-100000@leofric>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Organization: Pandamonium Reigns
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On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Colin Bruce wrote:
> Over the last few years several people have mentioned PDP-10 emulators
> but I've never been able to find one. Are they commercial only? Is such
> a thing available anywhere? I miss my old DECSYSTEM-20 (MR2172) so much
> and would love to see the @ prompt once more and be able to do SYSTATs etc.

There are at least two working emulators. I'm trying to see if at least
one of them can't be made publicly available.

22-Jan-1999 21:32:04 -0800,1116;000000000000
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Date: Fri, 22 Jan 99 21:14:09 PST
From: William "Chops" Westfield <[email protected]>
To: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, 22 Jan 1999 10:52:51 -0500
Message-ID: <[email protected]>

>> GNU/Linux is a very worthy successor.

Them's flaming words, Mr!

I gotta admit, though, that the free source stuff happening around Linux and
FreeBSD most closely resembles the old "tops community" as I remember it.

BillW

22-Jan-1999 21:32:21 -0800,2172;000000000000
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Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1999 21:30:28 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
To: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>
cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
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On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Dan Murphy wrote:
> I have to say, TOPS-20 was the best in its day, but the world has
> moved on. GNU/Linux is a very worthy successor. Don't leave home
> (or stay home) without it.

This may sound heretical to some, but I'm starting to think that NT is a
much more worthy successor than UNIX. Hidden underneath the GUI interface
is a very powerful operating system, that does a number of things right
that UNIX gets horribly wrong. Just off the top of my head: file locking,
file/memory mapping, file name case.

On the other side of the coin, UNIX very much betrays 1960s thinking.
Alphabet soup command switches, outdoing early TOPS-10 at its worst (PIP
may have had /Q, but TOPS-10 never had switches that were different based
upon case!). Core dumps(!). TTY orientation. Mediocre operating system
services; the shell is quite powerful, but it hides a weak OS (TOPS-20, of
course, being a powerful OS hidden under a weak shell). Lots of things
that are just plain wrong -- the locking system calls being outstanding
examples. A network filesystem that sort of works, if you throw out all
the advertised filesystem semantics. A repeat of TOPS-10's PRVTAB
mistake.

I've used UNIX as my primary OS for the past 11 years, and most of the
machines that I own run UNIX. But I see no particular benefit to running
UNIX on a laptop. I've done it, and decided that it wasn't worth it.

23-Jan-1999 01:01:00 -0800,2028;000000000000
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From: Stephane Tsacas <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
In-reply-to: <[email protected]> (message from Dan Murphy on
Fri, 22 Jan 1999 10:52:51 -0500)
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
References: <[email protected]>

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From: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>

[...]
I have to say, TOPS-20 was the best in its day, but the world has
moved on. GNU/Linux is a very worthy successor. Don't leave home
(or stay home) without it.
dlm

Take a look at :
http://www.jwz.org/worse-is-better.html

or

The Unix-Haters Handbook/Book and Barf Bag :
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568842031/qid%3D917067718/002-3961063-2322265

I was on the unix-Haters mailing list some years ago, does this list
still exists ?

,
Stephane

--
slt Stephane Tsacas, Institut Curie
@curie.fr 26 rue d'Ulm, 75248 cedex 5 Paris, France
http://www.curie.fr +33 (0)1 42 34 6772 / 6758 (Fax)
Rem. devnul frm addr. <<PUSHJ P, POPJ P, recursively>>

23-Jan-1999 01:01:15 -0800,2229;000000000000
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Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 00:56:05 -0500
To: [email protected]
From: Wexelblat <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
ReSent-Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 01:00:01 -0800 (PST)
ReSent-From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
ReSent-To: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
ReSent-Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
ReSent-Message-ID: <[email protected]>

Just to point out...

">but TOPS-10 never had switches that were different based
>upon case!)."

TOPS-10 didn't have case at all.
ASR-33's were uppercase only

(Yes, ultimately we got lowercase, remember, I did SYSDPY for the VT52 and
VT100 even though we kept saying that SYSDPY was unsupported) but the CLI
was created in an uppercase only world.

But then the PDP-1 used the FLEXOWRITER
FLEXO (FOO)
and the BBN PDP-1/d-45 used an upper/lower case IBM typewriter Soroban? for
a console terminal, and both the FLEXO and the soroban had the capability,
but only used upper.

...wex

24-Jan-1999 14:31:49 -0800,3249;000000000000
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Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 14:19:23 -0500
From: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!

Mark Crispin <[email protected]> writes:

> On the other side of the coin, UNIX very much betrays 1960s thinking.
> Alphabet soup command switches, outdoing early TOPS-10 at its worst (PIP
> may have had /Q, but TOPS-10 never had switches that were different based
> upon case!). Core dumps(!). TTY orientation.

Well, in my hindsight view, some of those things are the very
reason Unix has succeeded so well. The simple command lines may
be a pain for novice users, but that and the tty orientation
allows very effective pipelines and program-calling-program. If
you want a GUI, you can put it on top, but having the command line
and stdio conventions as they are is enormously powerful.

> I've used UNIX as my primary OS for the past 11 years, and most of the
> machines that I own run UNIX. But I see no particular benefit to running
> UNIX on a laptop. I've done it, and decided that it wasn't worth it.

The only reason I ever run Windoze is the shrink-wrap apps. One
of these days, a combination of apps being released for Linux
(e.g. Word Perfect) and Wine getting to sufficient strength will
eliminate even that reason.

Now THIS may sound heretical, but the thing I can't see any reason
to run nowadays is TOPS-20, by emulation or otherwise. Fate is
fate. If I, or someone else back in the days of TENEX and early
TOPS-20, had had the sense to recode it in a portable language,
history might have turned out very different. That didn't happen,
so it never made the jump to other -- particularly cheaper --
architectures.

In the widely-circulated talk* by Ken Thompson upon receiving the
ACM Turing Award, he observed that if TENEX had been written for
the PDP-11, "Daniel Bobrow would be standing here instead of me."
I suspect he was slightly off the mark. If TENEX had been written
in, or ported to, a language at least as portable as early C, then
his conjecture might have been more likely.

The history of operating systems, especially MS-DOS**, show that
they NEVER succeed or fail in achieving popularity because of
their inherent technical strength.

dlm

* - Ken Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust", ACM Turing
Award Lecture, CACM, Vol 27, No. 8, August 1984.

** - Yes, I know it's not a real operating system, but that's
the point -- it succeeded anyway.

24-Jan-1999 15:00:51 -0800,2155;000000000000
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Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 17:50:22 -0500
From: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Worse-is-better

Stephane Tsacas <[email protected]> writes:

> Take a look at :
> http://www.jwz.org/worse-is-better.html

I think I've seen that before. It is a very useful insight. It
is related to another old engineering aphorism - "the perfect is
the enemy of the good".

TENEX and TOPS-20 succeeded as well as they did, I think, because
we were not obsessed with "the-right-thing" mentality most of the
time. There were points in the TENEX design phase where we got
some good advise, or had some good sense, and drastically cut back
on complexity.

VMS is an example of an operating system built mostly with
"the-right-thing" thinking. Example: RMS (Record Management
Services) is the Right Thing, so we'll force everybody to use it.

Companies sometimes gain their initial success because they get
out some products with the New Jersey approach, and the products
are good enough to work for a lot of users. Now the company has a
lot of money, worries about a lot of things, and decides that,
from now on, they have to do thing "right". Thus, they shift into
"the-right-thing" style. Somehow, they then find that their
project are late and over budget. Code bases are bloated, and
bugs are unending.

Sound familiar? One Stratey, One...

MS-DOS was New Jersey. Hell, it wasn't even New Jersey. It was
Newark at most. NT. Now that's "the-right-thing". And it will
be ready Real Soon Now.

dlm

25-Jan-1999 10:00:13 -0800,2730;000000000000
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Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 23:38:44 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
To: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>
cc: [email protected]
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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On Sat, 23 Jan 1999 14:19:23 -0500, Dan Murphy wrote:
> Well, in my hindsight view, some of those things are the very
> reason Unix has succeeded so well. The simple command lines may
> be a pain for novice users, but that and the tty orientation
> allows very effective pipelines and program-calling-program. If
> you want a GUI, you can put it on top, but having the command line
> and stdio conventions as they are is enormously powerful.

This wasn't my point.

I don't think that UNIX succeeded because its user interface has commands such
as "grep" and "awk"; or that because the "ls" command has -R and -r switches
that do different things; or that when an application dies, all you get is a
core dump (even TOPS-10 did better than this!!!). Rather, I contend that UNIX
succeeded in spite of these deficiencies.

It *is* an advance that the UNIX shell supports piping. As we all know, this
could have been done in the Tenex/TOPS-20 EXEC, but it wasn't; and this led to
programmers writing software that didn't pipe. On UNIX, an non-interactive
application that doesn't pipe is roundly flamed.

What I was thinking about when I said "TTY orientation" is that, to this day,
UNIX thinks that all the world is a (Model 43) Teletype. Its sole concession
to displays is that it deletes in the right way. The termcap facility very
obviously comes from ITS; but it didn't go much further than ITS. [Rumors to
the contrary notwithstanding, ITS was *not* the "most display-oriented PDP-10
operating system"; WAITS had far more advanced display handling.]

Of course, TOPS-20 had the same flaws. It's rather sad that in 1999, we're
still stuck with the same TTY mindset as 1969.

So we end up with clunky X windows to get very basic display facilities; which
only helps if you have an X server. If you're not, you're hosed.

> Now THIS may sound heretical, but the thing I can't see any reason
> to run nowadays is TOPS-20, by emulation or otherwise.

Retrocomputing. History.

25-Jan-1999 20:23:32 -0800,2418;000000000000
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Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 20:48:59 +0100 (MET)
From: Johnny Billquist <[email protected]>
To: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
cc: Dan Murphy <[email protected]>, [email protected]
Subject: Re: double, double, TOIL, and trouble!
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
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On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Mark Crispin wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Dan Murphy wrote:
> > I have to say, TOPS-20 was the best in its day, but the world has
> > moved on. GNU/Linux is a very worthy successor. Don't leave home
> > (or stay home) without it.
>
> This may sound heretical to some, but I'm starting to think that NT is a
> much more worthy successor than UNIX. Hidden underneath the GUI interface
> is a very powerful operating system, that does a number of things right
> that UNIX gets horribly wrong. Just off the top of my head: file locking,
> file/memory mapping, file name case.

Hi, Mark. As a diehard pdp-11 and RSX fanatic, I can't help but start
smiling.
Anyway, I must say that I agree with your assessment of Unix. As for how
well NT really will be, I guess NT5 will show if they have lost track of
reality. From what it seems to me, they might be moving away from the
clean and nice design that's hidden in there at the bottom, to an ugly,
gargantuan GUI-loop. Maybe I'm just over-pessimistic, but since Cutler
isn't in there anymore, I suspect that the usual MS-clowns will mess
everything up.

Johnny

Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: [email protected] || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

14-May-1999 21:54:57 -0700,701;000000000000
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From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Subject: a dark day
To: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
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16 years ago today, DEC cancelled Project Jupiter and decided not to build any
new PDP-10 models.

15-May-1999 17:19:48 -0700,1286;000000000000
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Date: Mon, 14 May 1990 07:06:21 -0500
From: George Markham <[email protected]>
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And the world was a more mediocre place ever after to be sure.

Mark Crispin wrote:

> 16 years ago today, DEC cancelled Project Jupiter and decided not to build any
> new PDP-10 models.

15-May-1999 17:20:03 -0700,1287;000000000000
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Date: Sat, 15 May 1999 16:36:36 +0100 (BST)
From: Colin Bruce <[email protected]>
To: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
cc: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: a dark day
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On Fri, 14 May 1999, Mark Crispin wrote:

> 16 years ago today, DEC cancelled Project Jupiter and decided not to build any
> new PDP-10 models.

Funnily enough, 16 years on, DEC doesn't even exist anymore - just another
part of Compaq. I wonder how much of the rot set in 16 years ago.

Best wishes.....
Colin Bruce

16-May-1999 16:43:33 -0700,1651;000000000000
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in my less than humble opinion, the rot set in when DEC started trying to aclimate
all the Honeywell folks into DEC.
That was when it started moving towards digital. You know, the watch company.
Everyone had those new digital watches back in the 70s.

Just one ex-deccie's biased opinion.

bob

Colin Bruce wrote:

> On Fri, 14 May 1999, Mark Crispin wrote:
>
> > 16 years ago today, DEC cancelled Project Jupiter and decided not to build any
> > new PDP-10 models.
>
> Funnily enough, 16 years on, DEC doesn't even exist anymore - just another
> part of Compaq. I wonder how much of the rot set in 16 years ago.
>
> Best wishes.....
> Colin Bruce

14-Sep-1999 00:24:14 -0700,2192;000000000000
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Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1999 20:25:08 -0400
From: Joe Dempster <[email protected]>
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In a reasonably well written article in the Saturday, September
11, 1999 New York Times (page A7 in the NYC Edition), John
Markoff wrote about Louis Kao, the legendary proprietor of the
Palo Alto restaurant Hsi-Nan (closed in 1995), and his pending
retirement from the business of serving food to many of the icons

of days gone by in the Valley.

The final 5 paragraphs of this article nicely capture the flavor
of things that we all miss regarding a once great computer
company and an equally terrific user community:

"Jeff Rubin, a systems programmer at Stanford's Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, even worked for Mr. Kao as a waiter in
exchange for Chinese lessons. Which is why Mark Seiden, a
veteran programmer, remembers one day when a manager of the
laboratory (could this have been Les Earnest?) came to lunch with

a Digital Equipment salesman.

"At one point the two were arguing about a technical detail, and
the manager called a halt to the debate.

"There in no point in arguing," he said. "We can settle this
very easily. Let's ask the waiter."

"Can you tell us about the cache on the KL 10?" the laboratory
manager asked Mr. Rubin.

"It's a 32K two way associative cache," he replied, and then
walked away, leaving the salesman's mouth hanging open."

And that is how the article ended......

/joe

14-Sep-1999 14:20:02 -0700,1126;000000000000
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Date: Tue, 14 Sep 99 1:07:07 PDT
From: William "Chops" Westfield <[email protected]>
To: Joe Dempster <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: The KL 10 is in the news again....
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 13 Sep 1999 20:25:08 -0400
Message-ID: <[email protected]>

Jeff Rubin, a systems programmer at Stanford's Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, even worked for Mr. Kao as a waiter in
exchange for Chinese lessons.

I thought it was in exchange for (Chinese) cooking lessons?

BillW

14-Sep-1999 16:36:41 -0700,1389;000000000000
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From: [email protected] (Stephen Jones)
Subject: Re: The KL 10 is in the news again....
To: [email protected] (William "Chops" Westfield)
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1999 16:50:18 -0500 (CDT)
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> Jeff Rubin, a systems programmer at Stanford's Artificial
> Intelligence Laboratory, even worked for Mr. Kao as a waiter in
> exchange for Chinese lessons.
>
> I thought it was in exchange for (Chinese) cooking lessons?

Thats what I thought as well .. and I've actually taken chances like
that with both Chinese and South Indian! (Will work for cooking lessons).

Stephen Jones
http://thevisitors.com

09-Nov-1999 17:57:15 -0800,4912;000000000000
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Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 15:10:45 -0600 (CST)
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
From: Clive Dawson <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Fwd: Dave Poole may be lost at sea

I'm not sure how many folks remain on this list, but I thought
this message forwarded by MRC might be of interest, especially
to those who remember Dave.

Clive Dawson

------- Start of forwarded message -------
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 18:44:51 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Subject: Dave Poole may be lost at sea

If this is true, it is sad news. For those of you who don't know, Dave Poole
was the heart and soul of the Foonly. When the Foonly project at SAIL died,
many of his designs were subsequently taken over by DEC and became the KL10.

Poole subsequently formed the Foonly company, and built a single Super Foonly
(a.k.a. the Foonly F1), the fastest PDP-10 ever built, that was installed at
III. The Super Foonly was used to produce the graphics used in the movie
"TRON".

He subsequently built smaller-scale systems, the F2 and F3 (which were KS10
scale), and the F4 which subsequently became Tymshare's 26XL PDP-10 clone that
competed with System Concepts' SC-30M.

** Begin Forwarded Message **

Date: Mon, 8 Nov 1999 14:50:00 -0800 (PST)
From: Les Earnest <[email protected]>
Subject: David Poole Lost at Sea?

Vic Scheinman writes:
KCBS said this morning that: The Coast Guard has abandoned a search
off Alaska for a Mountain View man named David Poole. He's presumed
lost after his 52ft. boat was hit by winds of 80-100mph in Glacier
Bay.

There is also an article in this morning's San Jose Mercury News on
page 2B. I know that there is more than one David Poole in the world
-- for example, I know another one in North Carolina -- but inasmuch
as our former colleague was an avid sailor who was involved in two
catastrophic sinkings while he was at SAIL, I would sadly guess that
it is probably him.

Martin Frost writes:
The info below comes from the Coast Guard web site for Alaska, in a release
dated yesterday.
http://www.uscg.mil/d17/allnews/news99/23499.htm

In an unrelated search also in southeast Alaska, the Coast Guard suspend
efforts at 3:55 p.m. to find David Poole.

Poole left Mt. View, Calif., in September aboard his 52-foot sailboat, the
Bird, on a lone trip to southeast Alaska, according to his friend Barbara
Aschenbrenner. Aschenbrenner reported Poole missing Friday after she hadn't
heard from him in eleven days. Poole last contacted Aschenbrenner Oct. 25
after fueling in Hoonah.

Friday afternoon, the Coast Guard used a Sitka-based helicopter to search
Glacier Bay and issued radio broadcasts, asking mariners to report any
information they may have about Poole's whereabouts.

Saturday, a fishing vessel crew found a refrigerator from the Bird in
Glacier Bay and contacted the Coast Guard. Coast Guard personnel talked
with the craftsman, who custom built the refrigerator, and learned that it
must be disassembled to be removed from the vessel. This lead Coast Guard
officials to suspect the Bird broke apart and sank, according to Lt. Randy
Sundberg, a rescue coordinator at the Coast Guard command center here.

Saturday, the Coast Guard used a Kodiak-based C-130 to search for Poole
throughout southeast Alaska. Pilots from the Juneau CAP squadron also
searched Glacier Bay.

Today the 110-foot Coast Guard cutter Liberty, a Sitka-based helicopter,
CAP personnel and National Park Service personnel searched for Poole,
finding chunks of blue fiberglass, an extra-large lifejacket, a blue tote
and other debris suspected to have come from the Bird.

Searchers logged more than 67 hours before suspending their efforts to
locate Poole.

------- End of forwarded message -------

12-Nov-1999 18:53:35 -0800,5626;000000000000
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Date: Tue, 9 Nov 99 21:06:05 PST
From: Mark Lottor <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: remembering Poole
Message-ID: <[email protected]>

Hi-

A long time ago, I worked with Dave Poole at the SRI Computer Science
Lab. In 1984, SRI-CSL had 2 Foonly F4's running Tenex. I also worked
for many years at SRI-NIC, where they had a Foonly running Tenex. It
had an IMP interface and was directly on the MILNET. That machine was
mostly used for generating MILNET TAC access cards and keeping audit
info for MILNET billing information.

In late 1984, Poole was contracted to upgrade the CSL machines to run
TOPS-20 (a hardware and software upgrade), and I was contracted as a
systems programmer to work with Poole and CSL transitioning them over
to TOPS-20.

When Poole came to work on the machines, he would always bring his
bird along with him, and once in the machine room he would let it out
of the cage (it couldn't fly). Often, the bird would sit on his
shoulder as he hacked away on the VT100 consoles. The F4 used a 6802
(I think) as its front-end processor. It ran this small LISP like
interpreter that was used to load the microcode from disk into the F4
processor and get things bootstrapped. It was said no two Foonly's
were alike, as they were all hand built and mostly wire-wrapped. I
believe he built around 35 Foonly's.

One of the F4s, SRI-CSL, had an IMP/1822 interface and was on the
Arpanet. We decided to switch things over to ethernet and Poole
brought in these ethernet interfaces which I believe were closely
related to the Stanford MEIS interfaces. The boards were 2901 powered
and had hundreds of chips on them. Poole hacked away at the drivers
and we finally got the two F4's talking TCP/IP to each other. Then we
hooked things up to a PDP-11 router, but found that the F4s wouldn't
talk to anything but themselves. Poole worked on the problem for
days, looking at oscilloscopes on the ethernet, packet dumps and
logic analyzers, and re-reading the DIX specs over and over again.

During this debugging, the bird would often wander off, and many times
it would climb up the ethernet transceiver cables, and get up into the
cardcages of the F4s. Once we found it pecking away on some boards,
and it had knocked out a number of capacitor decoupling chips. It
also left a bunch of bird shit on the cables and cabinets of the
Foonly's.

After many days of work, Poole finally found the network problem. The
ethernet boards were wired up wrong, and were sending the bits of each
byte out in the wrong order! They could talk to themselves but no one
else! Instead of rewiring the messy boards, he microcoded a new F4
instruction that reversed the bits of 4 bytes in a word, hacked that
into the TOPS-20 drivers, and we finally were on the Internet.

At one point during his months of work, someone complained to SRI
management about him bringing his bird in. SRI told him he could no
longer bring it in because it was a health hazard. Poole refused to
continue working on the systems unless his bird could come with him.
Finally, someone at CSL worked out a plan where he snuck his bird in
and no one said anything about it.

He was definitely an extraordinary hacker. In a single day he could
go from hacking LISP console code, to writing new microcode, to
hacking TOPS-20 driver code, to wire-wrapping backs of boards, and
even to fixing pneumatic problems on the 1/2" tape drives.

One day he was working on some new microcode, and ran this compiler
called, I believe, SLO. I asked him what it stood for. He said
nothing, its called that because its so damn slow!

Around this period he lived on a sailboat in the Berkeley marina, and
I got a chance to sail with him and some friends in the SF Bay one
nice afternoon. Eventually, he got tired of fixing old Foonly's and
gave up on them, leaving his spare boards and all the Foonly
schematics in the CSL machine room. I thought they might be useful so
I took them home one day to save them. A few years later, I ended up
buying one of the CSL F4s for $222 at an SRI property auction (I think
the original cost was around $100K), and I ran it at home for a short
period of time (it used too much power for me then).

Years later, maybe in 1994-1995, I found out he was working at Sun in
Mountain View and his birthday was coming up. One night, I snuck the
6' backplane for my F4 (it was now a parts machine) with thousands of
wirewrap connections on it over to his office and placed it in the window
that separated his office and the hallway. I heard that when the
young Sun engineers went by his office the next day, he would explain
to them how they used to build computers in the good old days. A few
months later he asked if I had any of the schematics, so I took him
the entire box of drawings and he was happy to get them back.

I recall one day in 1984 working with him, and I asked, "So, could you
build a single board PDP-10?", to which he replied, "Sure, if the
board is big enough".

-Mark

12-Nov-1999 18:53:52 -0800,4917;000000000000
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Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 18:38:19 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Followup on Dave Poole (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.GUL.4.10.9911121836290.13428-100000@shiva2.cac.washington.edu>
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 1999 16:45:43 -0800 (PST)
From: Les Earnest <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
Subject: Followup on Dave Poole

There was a followup article in the S.J. Mercury News on Wednesday
(page 1B) saying that the Coast Guard had suspended the search for
Dave Poole. It mentioned that his friend, Barbara Aschenbrenner,
lives in Los Altos. We subsequently determined that she actually is
in Los Altos Hills and John Chowning talked to her.

She said she is planning some sort of get together (memorial) at the
Baylands Center in Palo Alto at the foot of Embarcadero, perhaps a
week from this Saturday and that she will confirm the time and date to
John.

John also sent email to the Coast guard and received the following
information just now.

-Les Earnest

----------------------------

Nov 12, 1999

Dear Mr. Chowning:

. .

Regarding further information about the search for Mr. Poole,
Commander Richard Stanchi of our search and rescue division here
recently wrote the following to another of Mr. Poole's friends.

"I am taking the opportunity to clarify some aspects of our search for
David. You read information contained in our Public Affairs website,
which only contained an overview of efforts to find David.

There are many other facts, assumptions, and models (based on
empirical data) that we evaluate before we suspend a search
effort. While we release information to the website we believe to be
factual, further examination of evidence may lead us to draw different
conclusions at a later time. For example, the blue fiberglass pieces
that were found in the search area were determined to not be connected
to this search and were discounted as evidence.

I can assure you that we conduct exhaustive searches and follow up on
all reasonable leads. The storm that probably caused the S/V Bird to
break up contained sustained 100 mph winds. David did not have any
survival suits, so any immersion in the waters of Glacier Bay would
lead to his incapacitation within minutes.

Recognizing this, and having had such a delayed alert to his
situation, we focused our efforts primarily on the shoreline where
survival was possible, had he made it there. We searched all the
shorelines of Glacier Bay, including all the islands as well as the
shorelines of Cross Sound and Icy Strait (the bodies of water outside
of Glacier Bay). There were several searches made by Coast Guard
helicopters, National Park Service and Civil Air Patrol aircraft in
addition to a Coast Guard cutter and a Park Service boat. During
debriefs the pilots indicated the search conditions were such that had
anyone been on the shorelines within the search areas, they would have
found them. I did not suspend efforts until I received this
confirmation as well the evaluating other evidence we had.

I extend to you the condolences, the sympathy, and prayers of all the
men and women of the Coast Guard in Alaska. Our sailors and airmen
know the ferocity of Alaskan seas, and how fragile mariners are in
their grasp. Whenever northern winds and seas take anyone, we feel the
loss most personally. Everyone who worked the search last week wished
we could have brought David back home safely. Sadly, however, our
efforts and the efforts of many others were just not enough under the
circumstances of this case.

It is my hope that you will draw some small consolation from knowing
the Coast Guard will remember David and continue to work as hard as we
possibly can to prevent recurrence of tragedies such as this one."

Mr. Chowning, if I can further assist you, please feel free to
contact me again.

Sincerely,

Roger W. Wetherell
Petty Officer First Class
webmaster
17th Coast Guard District
Juneau, AK 99802

21-Nov-1999 15:19:44 -0800,1238;000000000000
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Date: Sun, 21 Nov 1999 15:07:01 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Sender: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Subject: TOPS-20 list goes unmoderated...
To: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
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Some of the last flurry of messages about our late colleague Dave Poole were
delayed because the TOPS-20 list was moderated to stop spammers in general and
"Krazy" Kevin Lipsitz (the Staten Island magzine spammer) in particular.

It appears that Panda.COM's anti-spam filters are doing their job and keeping
this garbage out, so as an experiment I'm removing the moderation. That way,
any mail to [email protected] will go through immediately without waiting for
me to approve it.

We'll see if it works out.

By the way, if you post to the list, it must be exactly "[email protected]".
In particular, the old "tops20" alias is on many spammer mailing lists, as is
the host name "ikkoku-kan.panda.com"; neither one works any more.

20-Dec-1999 09:48:16 -0800,665;000000000000
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Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 09:47:04 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Sender: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Subject: December 20
To: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII

Happy DEC-20 day. Tell your DEC-20 that you still love it.

Say, is there going to be a 36th anniversary of 36bits party next year some
time? Anyone want to get something like that going?

31-Dec-1999 20:44:25 -0800,1240;000000000000
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Received: via tmail-4.1(11) (invoked by user mrc) for t20arc; Fri, 31 Dec 1999 20:44:24 -0800 (PST)
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 20:30:23 -0800 (PST)
From: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Sender: Mark Crispin <[email protected]>
Subject: countdown to Y2K
To: TOPS-20 Hackers and Yackers <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII

Many years ago, I made a pledge, published in Datamation, that my 2020 system
will see Y2K. In fufillment of that pledge, I have powered up my 2020 system
(for the first time in a year), and TOPS-20 is running now as I'm typing this
in.

I fully intend to save the CTY printout showing it handle the Y2K transition
without any problems. Meanwhile, I have the GIGI running the old demos.

That isn't the only thing going on here at Panda. Given that this night has
got to be the sleaziest night of the millennium, I have prepared an
appropriately sleazy way of celebrating it: chilling in the refrigerator is a
bottle of 1990 Dom Perignon and on the counter ready for consumption at
midnight is Gormay Kweezeen, otherwise known as four cans of SPAM.