Brasstacks

A bunch of stuff I was reading back then Weak Data Structures write-up by Bruno Haible, courtesy of Gary King . The classic UNIX HATERS Handbook. Panda's TOPS-20 System. Spare Time Gizmos store front to buy actual hardware emulators of the PDP-8. Rainer Joswig e-mail on feel of old Symbolics Lisp Machines An e-mail discussion about CHAOS vs. TCP in port collisions, a list of Symbolics CHAOS services Google cache of mahalito Symbolics Y2K statement ITS site HACK directory Google Groups discussion on Basic Chaosnet information Google Groups discussion on Chaosnet and ARP Google Groups discussion on Transmitting Chaosnet over Ethernet Google Groups discussion on Why Chaosnet (nostalgia) Google groups search for chaosnet ITS build information build.doc.txt 36bit.org Retro PDP-10

Wanted to collect a few links on ITS, the Incompatible Time-Sharing System The ITS 1.5 Reference Manual Bjorn Victor's Luser's Guide Bjorn Victor's e-mail setup (perhaps useful information for Lispm Zmail setup) The KLH10 PDP-10 emulator More information on PDP-10 emulation The www.its.os.org archive of AI & MC Paul Svensson's ITS system on the Web

I looked a little more closely at Bjorn Victor's (TODO: add diacritic to o in Bjorn) work on Chaos emulation for ITS emulators, particularly the CHUDP protocol for passing Chaos packets through UDP. Apparently, it uses a simple header (different from the user-mode UNIX header), and dynamically adds to its routing table when it receives incoming packets. This seems particularly handy. Also, I noticed that the chaosd/server code for the user-mode UNIX implementation does not typically check the hardware destination, but jumps right to the software header for the destination information. This seems wrong. I'm trying to figure out the most useful way to improve the Chaos support. Some of the use cases would be use Internet hosts as repositories for CADR Lisp Machine microcode and "world" bands use Internet hosts as file servers for Lisp machine source code provide Internet-based early-21st-century substitutes for 1980's functionality, such as e-mail and i...

I started this blog with a perfectly cryptic name: "wpblog." I suppose it is a natural impulse shared by many people who download WordPress and are faced with a blank box. I spent an additional minute on the issue today, and decided this was a blog about "getting down to brass tacks." Hence, my current name "BrassTacks." I'm not sure how good Google is at measuring the "uniqueness" of this sort of thing. "Voltaire" as the web host was a nod to my previous blog impulse left unfulfilled at blogger.com, when I was hoping to develop a vicious talent for satire. The name alone proved ineffective, but easy to remember. It turns out I have a few good names stored up; one is a nom de guerre, which, for security reasons, I will keep secret. I also have here a good name for an instrumental group: "The Cooper Brass Choir." Properly euphonious. If you have a good enough name for a techie blog, you may have it in exchange.