From budd at bu-it.bu.edu Fri Apr 20 04:31:38 1990 From: budd at bu-it.bu.edu (Phil Budne) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 90 22:31:38 EDT Subject: the future of ITS Message-ID: <9004200231.AA04513@bu-it.bu.edu> I started on a '10 simulator, but never wrote the 36 bit math needed. If you figure a 10 times performance hit a DS3100 or a SPARC might yield performance at the KA/KS level. From Alan at reagan.ai.mit.edu Fri Apr 20 04:01:00 1990 From: Alan at reagan.ai.mit.edu (Alan Bawden) Date: Apr 19 90 22:01 EDT Subject: Praise the hackers of the past! In-Reply-To: <722707.900418.ZVONA@AI.AI.MIT.EDU> Message-ID: <19900420020110.5.ALAN@PIGPEN.AI.MIT.EDU> Date: Wed, 18 Apr 90 20:11:04 EDT From: David Chapman ... the system crashed with DIR 2 ZVONA CLOBBERED PI LEVEL 2 BUGHALT I dumped to crash;zvona clobbr. Reloaded OK. THe directory also looks OK. I don't think I did anything weird to provoke this.... Occasionally a crash dump really does enable you to figure out exactly what the problem was. In this case the in-core copy of your directory really was trashed. It's pretty clear why too. The last 128. words of the ZVONA directory were replaced by the first 128. words of the C directory. Since disk sectors are exactly 128. words long, and the C directory is stored right after the ZVONA directory on disk, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what happened. Be thankful that many years ago some hacker made ITS paranoid about writing a directory back to disk without sanity checking it first. From jinx at zurich.ai.mit.edu Thu Apr 19 22:43:55 1990 From: jinx at zurich.ai.mit.edu (Guillermo J. Rozas) Date: Apr 19 90 16:43:55 edt Subject: the future of ITS In-Reply-To: Doug Humphrey's message of Thu, 19 Apr 90 16:28:03 EDT <723026.900419.DIGEX@AI.AI.MIT.EDU> Message-ID: <9004192043.AA15383@zurich.ai.mit.edu> I think that the idea of a PDP-10 simulator running on a fast Unix box is pretty funny, but would be a very cool hack. Writing such a simulator (except IO instructions) is straight-forward, but changing ITS to do virtual IO would probably be far more painful. It may also require a fair amount of hacking from a very small group of people (Alan, Moon,...), and that may not be reasonable. From DIGEX%AI.AI.MIT.EDU at MINTAKA.LCS.MIT.EDU Thu Apr 19 22:28:03 1990 From: DIGEX%AI.AI.MIT.EDU at MINTAKA.LCS.MIT.EDU (Doug Humphrey) Date: Apr 19 90 16:28:03 EDT Subject: the future of ITS Message-ID: <723026.900419.DIGEX@AI.AI.MIT.EDU> I would be interested in getting a discussion going on the future of ITS. This would be open to any kind of strange ideas, from running it on existing KS-10 hardware (at MIT or not) to building a PDP-10 software simulator that can run on existing and/or future cpus, like MIPS chips, etc. In short, before these machines go away, and all of the ITS knowledgable people too far away, lets talk about this stuff. Another point is that INFO-ITS and KS-OWNERS lists should continue to live after the ITS systems go into hibernation so that advances in the ITS state-of-the-art can be announced and discussed. Comments, etc? Doug Humphrey digex at mit-ai digex at tumtum.cs.umd.edu From ZVONA%AI.AI.MIT.EDU at MINTAKA.LCS.MIT.EDU Thu Apr 19 02:11:04 1990 From: ZVONA%AI.AI.MIT.EDU at MINTAKA.LCS.MIT.EDU (David Chapman) Date: Apr 18 90 20:11:04 EDT Subject: No subject Message-ID: <722707.900418.ZVONA@AI.AI.MIT.EDU> Well, this is spectacularly ironic. I was just about to write a magtape of my AI directory to take to CA -- literally seconds from doing so -- when the system crashed with DIR 2 ZVONA CLOBBERED PI LEVEL 2 BUGHALT I dumped to crash;zvona clobbr. Reloaded OK. THe directory also looks OK. I don't think I did anything weird to provoke this.... From ALAN%AI.AI.MIT.EDU at MINTAKA.LCS.MIT.EDU Sat Apr 14 08:40:47 1990 From: ALAN%AI.AI.MIT.EDU at MINTAKA.LCS.MIT.EDU (Alan Bawden) Date: Apr 14 90 02:40:47 EDT Subject: A sad day Message-ID: <721426.900414.ALAN@AI.AI.MIT.EDU> I'm sorry to announce that we're going to shut down the ITS machines at MIT. As we plan for the final shutdown, the file AI:SYS;GOOD BYE will be constantly updated to contain the current plans. What follows is the current contents of that file, and it pretty much explain the situation: ------- Well, the time has finally arrived to shut down the ITS machines for the last time. The hardware is getting old, and the amount of maintenance required to keep things running is getting out of hand. We've been losing ground at an accelerating rate for the last year. The current plan is to turn AI and MC off for good sometime around the end of May. We plan to take a snapshot of AI and MC's filesystem sometime before the final shutdown and to keep this snapshot available on some other file server for a couple of months. People who have a large number of files to evacuate, but who lack efficient network access to AI and MC, are encouraged to simply wait until after this snapshot becomes available. AI's second RP06 (SECOND:) will be fixed soon to make it easier for people to evacuate themselves. Files on ITS backup tapes will be unavailable until someone writes the program to read them. Before the shutdown, modest file retrieval requests (mail to FILE-R at AI) will be considered. Extensive or complicated retrieval requests will have to wait until after the dust settles after the shutdown. Our judgment on these matters will be final. Sorry. All mailing lists will have to be moved elsewhere. If you maintain a mailing list on AI or MC, you can save us some trouble by moving your mailing list yourself as soon as possible. We'll try and do something responsible about those important lists that don't have obvious owners, but don't count on us to save your mailing list for you -- we might decide to just let it perish. Please try not to pester us about the personal inconvenience this causes you. We don't have any suggestions about where you should read your mail now, where you can keep your files, or where you can move your mailing list, and we wish we knew of another PDP-10 that you could use. (If you -must- pester someone, send mail to DOOMSDAY at AI.) We do appreciate your loyalty to ITS during its lifetime at MIT. Stop by sometime and we can talk about the good old days when dinosaurs ruled the machine room. As we continue to plan for doomsday, this file will be updated with the latest news. - Alan -------