2.9BSD for the Pro/350

[ This directory was sent in by Ken Wellsch in Feb 1999. Also see the
  directory ../2.9-pro350 -- Warren ]

The contents of this subtree represent the contents of the media sent
to me in April 1998 by Rick Macklem.  Below is the specific e-mail
correspondence from Rick that mentions this material:

| From rick@snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca Mon Apr  6 12:37:35 1998
| 
| Well, the short answer is "I'm not sure what the answers are". At one
| point someone mentioned they were putting the Pro stuff into 2BSD, but
| I'm not sure if they actually did it. (The guys that used it the most
| had it running on a lab of Pro380s at Columbia U. (I think. It's the
| one right in NY city.)) His name was Charlie Kim (again, I think?) and
| did some stuff to it so that it worked reasonably well on a Pro380, but
| I have no idea how you might find him now. (It was a real dog on a Pro350
| because it didn't have separate I and D space.)
| 
| The stuff I did went out on a Usenix distribution tape in about 1983/84
| and had to be merged into a 2.9BSD distribution. I did generate floppy
| sets for a few people, because that was the only easy way to get it
| installed. (The first install here was actually done by downloading the
| kernel over the serial port talking to the PDP 11 prom (ODS?).)
| 
| I'll take a look around here and see if I can find any of it lying about.
| (If I do, I'll let you know and I can mail it to you.) If it did get
| merged into the 2BSD dist., that would be the better place to find it,
| since it would include Charlie's Pro380 fixes. (I vaguely recall his
| variant wouldn't boot on a 350 and since that was all I had, I didn't
| merge his changes into mine.)
| 
| Good luck with it, rick

The material he mailed me also included a 1985 Usenix distribution
tape.  I have not attempted to read the tape; I would presume it is
what he refers to above.

The other contents I have attempted to reproduce here in this subtree.
The documentation directory contains scanned copies of the 8 pages
of photo-copied-hand-written notes included.

The other three directories contain the contents of three 5.25" floppy
disk boxes.  Each set contained recycled RX50 floppies (recycled as in
the majority were P/OS distribution diskettes or the like) with hand-
written labels (save one I've called "unknown.")

Working with a DEC Pro/380 running Venix 1.1, I read each RX50 floppy
and saved the images, one per diskette.  I selected names that will
hopefully give a sufficient clue as to the original title.

I made the mistake of using the command "dd if=/dev/rf0 of=out.rx50 bs=20b"
for reasons that are not completely clear to me.  With Venix 1.1 this
had the effect of transferring 780 blocks, missing the last 10, which
I didn't know about until later.  The "dd" operation yielded "I/O Error"
and "39+0" when complete.  I think I expected to see a partial and did
not, as in "39+10."

I later wrote a small program to read the final 10 blocks off each floppy
and the result is what is provided here.

I believe the RX50 is actually 80 tracks with 10 sectors per track, thus
yielding 800 blocks per disk.  I think the first track is reserved and
thus Venix would not let me at it.  Hopefully I have not also lost
additional information here too.

There is also the issue of block interleaving.  I have a nagging recollection
of having some difficulties with physical block/sector numbers being
remapped as a "performance enhancement" by Venix.  That is, reading
sequential blocks from a floppy using Venix 1.1 may not produce what
is expected.  At this moment I don't have any way to check the extracted
contents to confirm/deny this theory.

Venix 1.1 also has a second floppy device called "/dev/rf0.m11" and I
think that reminded me of the interleaving issue.  I chose to use the
device "/dev/rf0" as that seemed to be the "normal" one.  I was unable
to find any documentation that explained the "m11" variant so I thought
I'd not try it.  The Venix system had room for only 3 images at a time
and it took me ~30 minutes per block of 3 images using kermit to get
the data off the Pro/380 system.

  Ken Wellsch
  February 1999