h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A long time ago in a town far far away (Basingstoke) lived a company called Digital Equipment Corporation. Also known as DEC.

DEC were the home of TLA's.

DEC had TLA's for everything.

PDP, VAX, VMS, VMB, RSX, etc.

You could put just about any three letters infront of the characters 11-AA and order it, knowing that it would match *something* (probably not what you wanted, but such was the challenge in buying from DEC)

Any ex-VMS man will tell you that TLA's invaded the software too. You had to know your LIB routines from your MTH, SMG, STR, SYS, EXE, OTS, PAS, COB, FOR, and BAS functions. System managers would rejoice in knowing the meaning of UAF, LAT, NCP, UCX, DMU, CDD, and DTR. Device driver writers would complain about the difficulties of getting their DDTs to work with their QIO's.

DEC have now been taken over by Compaq; it remains to be seen if the TLA mentality invades them...

ROFL! I remember all that lark, it was brilliant! Oh, the challenge of ordering stuff from DEC, the amazement at what you actually received

If you dig deeply, and in the right place, you can still unearth some of the DEC 'excuse me while I move the world to help a customer' attitude, but its buried uunderneath the Compaq 'Urgh! a customer'

H&K
Z

I still have a few DEC contacts, but given the wholesale strangling of DEC's technical expertise by their new owners, sometimes they phone me for info.

I have a staggeringly large amount of microfische manuals, schematics, service documents, and even VMS source code on microfische. I'm not sure I should have the VMS source code, but it's here, in all it's gory BLISS, COBOL, FORTRAN and Macro (not a hint of C).

So, next time you need to know what rating the fourteenth resistor on the left of you XYZ11-AB is, you know where to come. (It might take a while to find, as I don't have a fische reader, I have to muck about with a magnifying glass, or go down the local library (who are soon going computerised, and will be ditching their fische reader)

Sad death of a once spiffing company

VMS source on micro-fish? how very odd. But very interesting. I found a microVax II at the local tip once, one of the later, smaller ones. Had to be physically restrained from buying it and taking it home It would have been an excellent piece of kit to keep running, but I could think of no actual use for it. I could get hold of some of the s/ware for it (you could get more by the sound of it!) but hacking the license DB is a bit beyond me

I must buy a secondhand fish reader one day, that reminds me.

Oo, oo, Macro! I have a book on learning to program in Macro, right from 2+2=(undefined error) upwards. Made me brain melt after chapter 2! LOL

H&K
Z

We still have five working MicroVAX-II's, although they are only running off two disks now, as the disks (where were 8" Fujitsu SMD drives) are slowly degrading until the oxide build-up on the heads stops them altogether.

At the moment, we still run the hotel reservation system (Lysses House Hotel, Fareham) and the accounts on it, although the PC version will be ready 'real soon now'.

As for the VMS license system, simple. The trick is to attack it from the other end. Install a license for one thing, then mess with the executable to make it look for the wrong license. More I won't say, but it's a remarkably simple (if time consuming) way to do it.

Most of the TLA's around came from the fact that the (DOS) 6.3 file system limited them to 3 letter file extensions. Of course, many of you newbies wouldn;t know anything about that

Basically you were limited to 6 characters, a dot, then 3 characters. It took 5 minutes just to decide what filename you were going to give your document! No wonder comupting then was so slow!

Athon Solo

Not six charactes, a dot, and three characters.

The followers of the true religion know that you have six bytes. The first four encode the name of the file in Radix-50*, and the last two encode the extension. The dot isn't stored, but is always implied.

RSX-11M+ allowed nine characters for the file name (eight bytes of Radix-50; whee!)

VMS got lazy and just declared a bunch of 32-byte buffers with a five-bit counter in the front byte. From then on, filesystems got lazy.

Have you seen the Microsoft method of storing long file names? The only way I can think that someone came up with that is by sitting down in a committee, with the objective of producing the most ridiculously over complicated monster of a directory structure imaginable, and then layering it on top of a backward filesystem for compatibility purposes. Then they invent fat32 to throw compatibility out of the window. Isn't it just great?

What were we talking about again?

*Radix 50 was DEC's way of encoding three characters into two bytes using a fifty-character set, as 50x50x50 = 175000, which fits into the maximum you can store in 16 bits, i..e 177777 with room to spare. If you have not grokked that I'm talking in Octal, you're not worthy of this conversation.

The 50 characters were A-Z (that's 32 of them)
The numbers 0-9 (that's another 12, making 44)
And a four special characters which if I remember right were - _ $ and (null), making 50.

If only PC's used Macro-32 (or Macro-11 at a push), we'd be in a far better state today than with that incomprehensible gotta-be-backwards-compatible-at-the-expense-of-being-useful mess that we have with today's processors.

Most of the VMS operating system code is written in Macro, but most of the tools are written in BLISS, a very strange language I never learnt how to write. There's various bits of Cobol and Fortran in there, with C creeping in on some of the later stuff.

As the last release I have full source for is VMS 4.4, there's not much C. Atleast DEC always used what, in their opinion, was the right language for the job. If there wasn't a good language for the job, they'd invent one. VaxTPU is one of the best text editing facilities I've met. Please, someone, please port it to Linux before I go mad and do it myself!!

I don't refer to the sources much any more, mainly because of a lack of fische reader. They still have a couple at the local library, but they always get confused when I pull my own fisches out of my bag. Anyone got a fische reader for sale?

I used to work on the Nimrod Maritime Crew Trainer (MCT) another TLA when I was in the RAF (yet another TLA).

The thing was run by a suite of DEC machines. I think it was 4, 1170's, and 2, 1145 all ethernetted together. I must say for their age they were remarkably reliable albeit a bit archaic. There was a VAX as well which was primarily a storage device as far as I remember.



Bassman