If you are looking to download files from the existing disk image, for example the manual for the COPY command in COPY.RPH[S,DOC], the easiest way is to get these from saildart.org. Simply prepend https://www.saildart.org/ to the file you want to get and open it in a browser or download via wget or curl. Note that the file you get is in HTML, so characters like < will be encoded as <.

If the file you want to get is a binary file rather than a text file, saildart will automatically output it in octal format. Each line of the file will be a 36-bit word encoded as octal digits.

To force a text file to be encoded as binary, add _octal to the end of the URL, eg https://www.saildart.org/COPY.RPH[S,DOC]_octal.

The file you get will be the most recent version in the DART archive. Sometimes you want an earlier version, eg to ensure you are viewing a manual from 1974. To check this, open the directory listing for the file you want, eg https://www.saildart.org/[S,DOC]. Here you can see there are several different versions, from 1972 to 1976:

File detector on saildart.org. Source: Rupert Lane. License: CC0.

Note the version number after the directory name, so here I've selected version 8 which is dated 1974-07-24. To get this file directly you would go to https://www.saildart.org/COPY.RPH[S,DOC]8.

There is one quirk - for the latest version of the file you should not provide the version number, so if you wanted version 11 from 1976 you should request https://www.saildart.org/COPY.RPH[S,DOC]. If you try to fetch https://www.saildart.org/COPY.RPH[S,DOC]11 it will fail.

Using the virtual line printer is a good way to get text files - either system files or your own files - out of the system.

First you need to attach a text file to the virtual printer so you can view the output on your PC. For the quckstart this is done for you already and the file used will be printer.txt. Otherwise you will need to press Control-E in the simh window and enter commands:

sim> at lpt -n printer.txt
%SIM-INFO: LPT: creating new file: printer.txt
sim> cont

The -n switch creates a new printer text file each time simh starts. If you want to keep previous output and append to the file, change this to -a.

Then in WAITS, use the LIST command to send files to the printer, eg

.list hworld.f4

This takes wildcards like other COPY-class commands.

If you then look at your printer file on your PC you will see the file (it may take several seconds) with a header like this:

26-JUL-74    0955            HWORLD.F4  1,REL            PAGE 1-1

LIST sends files directly to the printer. On the real system you would normally use the spooler by typing PRINT instead, but this is not running on the emulated system.

If you want to extract several files from WAITS, here is a method using emulated tapes and the WAITS DART program - the same program that produced the backup tapes on saildart.org.

You will first need to get the dart utility from Lars Brinkhoff's set of PDP-10 tools:

$ git clone https://github.com/larsbrinkhoff/pdp10-its-disassembler/
$ cd pdp10-its-disassembler/
$ make dart

Copy the dart executable file to somewhere on your PATH.

Next, on the simh console, we will create a blank tape file on your PC backup.tap and attach it to the emulated tape drive MTA0.

Press Control-E to enter simh command mode and then type the following. Note that MTC0 on simh maps to MTA0 on WAITS.

sim> at mtc0 backup.tap
%SIM-INFO: MTC0: creating new file
%SIM-INFO: MTC0: Tape Image 'backup.tap' scanned as SIMH format
sim> cont

Switch to your WAITS login and run R DART, then at the * prompt type dump and the files you want to save. Type exit when done.

.r dart

*dump *.f4
HWORLD F4      1,REL
SECOND F4      1,REL
*exit

EXIT
^C
.

On your host PC, use the dart command you compiled earlier with the -tf option to view what's on the tape.

$ dart -tf backup.tap 

DART VERSION 5  TAPE HEADER
RECORDED 1974-07-26 10:10,  BY [  1,REL] USER CLASS
   DSK:    HWORLD.F4 [  1,REL]        256   1974-07-26 19:02
   DSK:    SECOND.F4 [  1,REL]          3   1974-07-26 19:52
END OF TAPE (NO TRAILER)

Use the -xf option to extract files. It will create directories in reverse order to store the files, ie HWORLD.F4[1,REL] will go to rel/1/hworld.f4.

$ dart -xf backup.tap
$ ls rel/1/
hworld.f4  second.f4

To upload files from your PC to WAITS, we can use the same technique bur in reverse. First, use dart with the -cf option to create a upload tape file. Here we create the tape upload.tap containing two Lisp files one.lsp and two.lsp intended for [1,REL] by placing them in the reverse directory structure shown above.

$ ls rel/1/
one.lsp  two.lsp
$ dart -cf upload.tap rel/1/*

Switch back to the simh console, press Control-E and attach the new file.

sim> at mtc0 upload.tap
%SIM-INFO: MTC0: Tape Image 'upload.tap' scanned as SIMH format
sim> cont

Go to your WAITS login and use DART with the RESTORE command to get all the files in the archive. You can specify which files to restore but here we choose to restore everything:

.r dart

*restore *.*[*,*] _ *.*[*,*]
DART VERSION 5  TAPE HEADER
RECORDED  11:02 20-Jul-126,  BY [DMP,SYS] USER CLASS
ONE    LSP     1,REL
TWO    LSP     1,REL
DART VERSION 5  TAPE TRAILER
RECORDED  11:02 20-Jul-126,  BY [DMP,SYS] USER CLASS
MT READ ERROR. MT STATUS = 200610
MT READ ERROR. MT STATUS = 200610
...

When it reaches the end of the tape it will repeatedly say MT READ ERROR. MT STATUS = 200610; just press Control-C to quit and then verify your files have been transferred.

.dir *.lsp

26-JUL-74  1104
FILNAM  EXT   SIZE LAST WRITTEN

   [1,REL]
ONE     LSP      2  31-JUN-71
TWO     LSP      2  31-JUN-71
        TOTAL=     4

The WAITS DART tape backup command is described in DART.REG[UP,DOC].

Lars Brinkhoff is working on getting simh and the WAITS image to provide Arpanet functionality via emulation at sailing-on-arpanet; once this is fully running it may be possible to upload and download files via ftp.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com and I will add it here and update the main text.

SOS - Son of Stopgap - was developed at Stanford and is a basic line orientated editor that can be run from any terminal type.

You can invoke it with CREATE file and it will create a file, start SOS and let you enter text immediately, or EDIT file to edit an existing file. The * prompt allows you to enter single letter commands: in the above we see P to print the file and E to exit. Each line has a line number prepended to it and you can give line numbers as arguments to commands, eg P 100,200.

The version we saw on TOPS-10 is similar to what we have running on WAITS, so see my earlier post for more information. There are a couple of differences:

• files are always saved with line numbers; there is no equivalent of the ES command
• on display terminals only, the Z command will allow you to edit a line with the standard line editing commands like Control-Space to move the cursor forwards and Control-Backspace to move it back. See the blog entry on terminals for more details.

Finally, on the console, SOS will represent non-standard characters that are in the Stanford ASCII character set by preceding each with the escape character ?, for example alpha α is shown as ?". This includes lower case letters, eg lower case a is ?A. A plain question mark is ??. See the SOS manual section 1.4 for details.

TECO - Text Editor and Corrector - is DEC's powerful but somewhat cryptic character orientated editor. Operating this is the same as on TOPS-10, so see my post there for more details. Type MAKE file to create a file and start editing it, type TECO file to edit an existing file.

A display editor allows full use of the screen and keyboard of a display terminal like the III or DD, so you can navigate around the file and make changes quickly. This is similar in concept to editors you use today like Emacs or Vim, but the execution, and especially the keystrokes used, are quite different. The WAITS display editors predate the above editors and the IBM PC so there was no convention for it to follow.

Stanford created the TV editor initially in the late 1960s, and then rewrote it as the E editor; the functionality is much the same.

However, at present neither editor works completely on simh. E will crash after a few commands, and both E and TV don't properly display the arrow that shows what line you are on, so it's hard to make changes to a file. Neither editor works on the saildart.otg emulator.

But to give a taste of how these worked, I'll show how to create, view, navigate and edit files using TV.

   α     means hold the "CONTROL" key down while typing a character.
   β     means hold the "META" key down while typing a character.
   αβ    means hold both "CONTROL" and "META" keys down while typing.
   ⊗     means use either α or αβ with the next character.

As of 1974, SOS is documented in SOS.LES and TV in TVED.DCS. See E.ALS for an idea of how much was available in the E editor as of 1989.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com and I will add it here and update the main text.

The origins of SPELL are in work Les Earnest did at MIT to recognise cursive handwriting in the late 1960s/early 1960s. He put together a dictionary of around 10,000 English words (from ABANDON to ZOOLOGICAL) and wrote a subroutine in assembly to match against handwritten words, producing an output file of words not recognised. Les moved to SAIL in 1965 and took his dictionary with him (pictured below, on paper tape). In 1967 this was used by a grad student to write a program in LISP that would match words in a text file and print out anything it did not recognise.

10,000 words on paper tape. Source: Les Earnest via archive.org. License: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

Finally, in 1971. Ralph Gorin (the REG whose login we have been using to access our emulated WAITS instance) wrote SPELL, using the same dictionary. This took a text file - and an optional user dictionary - as input, checked the words contained and if it did not recognise a word, offer the user several alternatives such as select a candidate replacement from the dictionary, ignore the word, add to personal dictionary etc. This became popular at SAIL and was also adopted by Tenex and other PDP-10 sites. Later versions could understand text files using document preparation languages like PUB and TeX.

Type R SPELL to start the program. On display terminals it will present a multi-pane-of-glass view like the above, but it also supports an interactive teletype session with * as the prompt.

First it asks if you want a personal directory and any switches to support dictionary maintenance. It will then ask for the input and output files (it can't edit a file in place). Here we'll use a file called blog.in that contains a single sentence "I make mnay mistakes.".

.r spell
Do you want to augment the dictionary? n
Mode switches (zero or more of T,Q,N,U,P,A, or ?):  
Name of the file to check and correct: blog.in
File name for correction output: blog.out
File for exceptions: 
No exception file.

When it detects a spelling mistake it will prompt you for what to do next

working...
Page 1:1
I make mnay mistakes.
mnay
Type S,A,I,R,X,D,W,L or ?

If you've ever run ispell on Unix (or its Emacs interface) the commands will look remarkably similar - a to accept, i to insert into personal directory, r to retype the word by hand etc. In fact ispell traces its origins back to SPELL, starting with a revised version on the PDP-10 and eventually being ported to C and Unix.

On the display terminal you can see a list of candidate words on the right which you can choose from. On teletypes, you need to press s and then use Return to see the options.

*s
Type C,^,<altmode>,<cr> or ?
MANY
*
MAY
*
Those are all the choices.  Type S,A,I,R,X,D,W,L or ?
*s
Type C,^,<altmode>,<cr> or ?
MANY
*c
Finished.

Before it exits it will prompt for some options to continue checking other files or manage core files. But the normal response is e to save the output file and exit.

Type E,S,C,A,D,I, or ? e

EXIT
^C

The 1974 source code for SPELL is on the WAITS disk as SPELL[S,REG] and the master dictionary in SLOVAR[S,REG] (unfortunately the [S,REG] directory is not accessible on saildart.org). The source file has around 5600 lines, 4700 of which are FAIL assembly source code and the rest is the manual. The header reads.

	TITLE	SPELL	I HAVE YOU UNDER MY SPELL
;		SPELLING CHECK  & CORRECTION.
;		R. E. Gorin 20 February, 1971
;		Revised July 23, 1972 III displays
;		TENEX version 1/12/74 Wiiliam W. Plummer, mod REG 11/19/74
;		Additional features, October 1974, Jerry Wolf, mod REG 11/23/74

Internally the program uses a form of hash coding, where words with the same first two characters and length are stored in a list so candidate replacements can be found quickly.

The program detects four types of mistakes; from the manual:

1. one wrong letter.
2. one missing letter.
3. one extra letter.
4. two transposed letters.

The executable program is built by assembling the code, starting it and giving it a master dictionary file name. It then builds its hash tables and stops, at which point the core image is saved for future use. This was a common technique for machines of this area. as the resulting core file starts up quickly as the master dictionary read and parse does not need to take place. The downside is that the master dictionary cannot be changed without rebuilding the program.

SPELL is documented in SPELL.REG[UP,DOC]

Here's a video of Ralph Gorin accepting an award for his work on SPELL at a SAIL reunion in 2009.

See Les Earnest's paper on the first spell checker at archive.org.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com and I will add it here and update the main text.

In the previous post we talked about PPNs like [1,REG]; here REG is the ID that identifies which user you are.

To create a new user ID, simply choose a 3 letter ID and log in as that. This must be on a device internal to SAIL, ie the console or display terminal, not via the external communication lines that are modelled by a telnet connection on simh.

Here I choose REL as an ID and log on. It asks me if I am sure, as this is a new ID, and if I type Y I am logged in and can run programs or create files.

.l 1,rel
JOB 1    Stanford 6.17/K 08-16-74
Are you sure? y
Friday  26-JUL-74       0945
.

If I log out with an empty directory, it will be removed.

.k
Your empty file directory has been deleted.

But it is recreated the next time I log in.

If you had logged in as 1, FOO, you would get this message when you logged out:

You are not an authorized user. Your files have been deleted.

This turns out to be a simple check in the LOGOUT routine - if your user ID is one of FOO, BAR, BAZ, ABC, 100 it will say you are unauthorised, probably because these are common IDs used for testing.

You will note that no password was asked for at any stage. You can set a password by replacing the . with a % at the login stage, eg L 1%REL. You get the option to only ask for a password if you are logging in remotely so you don't need to supply it when logging in via the console or display terminals.

The password is set at the PPN level on the user file directory entry, so you could have a different password for say 1,REL and 2,REL. According to the UUO (system calls) manual it is stored in plain text, case insensitive with a maximum length of 6 characters.

Files and directories have a 3 octal digit protection code.

The default protection is 000, so anyone can do anything.

To set protection on files, you need to use COPY with the /PROTECTION flag to create a new file with the desired level, eg

.copy /protection=006 foo2 ← foo1

would create FOO2 from FOO1 but set protection so guest users can't access it at all.

Directory protections can only be set by logging in with the % delimiter

WAITS is quite similar to TOPS-10 here so reading the Jobs on TOPS-10 post will give more details. But in brief:

When you log in to WAITS, it gives you a job number which lasts throughout your session. Some simple commands (like DAYTIME) you type are built into the monitor. Others need to be loaded into memory from core files, which have the extension .DMP on WAITS.

If you have a core file FOO.DMP in your directory you can invoke it with RUN FOO. Common programs are stored in the SYS: area, which is equivalent to [1,2], and programs here can be run using R. RUN can also take a file name and directory, so R LISP is the same as RUN LISP.DMP[1,2].

Some common programs, like COPY, are recognised by the monitor but behind the scenes it will invoke RUN on the right core file.

You can create another job by logging in a second terminal. But you can also DETACH from a job, which will suspend it and log you out, and then log in elsewhere and resume execution using ATTACH. Jobs can also run in the background if they do not need interact with the user's console.

All that is pretty much the same as TOPS-10. WAITS adds some more conveniences. FORK works like DETACH, but rather than logging you out will create a new job as your current ID. KILL can be used to kill a job owned by you.

WAITS replaces TOPS-10's SYSTAT with WHO, along with the "who line" we saw earlier on interactive terminals.

TOPS-10 had a fairly sophisticated batch processing system, where jobs could be submitted from the terminal or via cards, and queues of jobs could be maintained and run in the background.

WAITS chose instead for a simple facility to run from the terminal, similar to a shell script file on a modern system. The concept is you create a file with a set of commands or data to input to those commands. The end of each line must be denoted by a ↔ rather then Return. There are a number of other metacharacters to allow you to enter the special keys on the Stanford keyboard, eg ≠ will emit an Altmode key

You run the file with DO and it basically pastes data it into your keyboard buffer as if you'd typed it directly, expanding any metachracters.

There is provision for variables via the question mark and a single letter, eg ?A. The first time this is seen it will prompt for input and store that in variable A; from then on using ?A will expand it to the value you entered.

There is no looping or branching available, however.

As an example, if you have the file foo.do:

hello↔dir [?D,DOC]↔

and type DO FOO.DO it will run the hello command, prompt you for a value for D then do a directory listing of that area under DOC.

See the Monitor Command Manual for more details on these topics.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com and I will add it here and update the main text.

Files are named file.ext where file is 1-6 characters long and ext 0-3. The extension is used to identify the type of file, eg HELLO.SAI would be a source code file in SAIL, the lab's version of Algol. One exception is seen in some shared directories, where the file extension is the initials of the person maintaining the file.

Filenames are case insensitive, and each character is stored using 6 bits instead of the usual 7 bit Stanford ASCII. This means that the special characters in Stanford ASCII like ← or α cannot be used in file names.

PPN means project and programmer number. These are both 1-3 alphanumeric characters long, with the programmer number (eg REG) identifying the person and the project number (eg 1) indicating a particular set of work. Programmer numbers can also be shared areas, eg DOC.

This information is given when you log in (eg typing L 1, REG) and also represents an area of the disk, for which is written in square brackets, (eg [1, REG]). By convention, [1, xxx] is like the home directory of user xxx, but the number 1 itself has no special meaning. Users would generally have different project numbers for different tasks, eg REG has [CRF, REG] for working on the CREF program and [DOC, REG] for documentation tasks.

To change directories, eg from [1, REG] to [DOC, REG] you could log out and log back in again with K and then L DOC,REG. But an easier way is to use ALIAS. With one argument this will change your project number, so ALIAS DOC will put you in [DOC, REG], as seen in the screenshot above. When invoked with two comma-separated arguments it will change to that PPN, eg ALIAS 1,BGB. With no arguments it will return to the directory you logged in as.

Typing R ALIAS will show what your current alias is, and what you logged in as.

To create a new directory, you need to log in with that PPN, so to create [FOO, REG] log out with K then log in with L FOO,REG. It will ask you for confirmation and then create an empty directory which you can start adding files to.

When you log out, if your logged in directory has zero files, it will be deleted.

Alphanumeric PPNs are a change from TOPS-10, which only allowed octal numbers. Unlike TOPS-10, there is no concept of sub-directories on WAITS.

There are several commands to manipulate files which share a common code base.

In general the arguments for these commands takes the form destination ← source. On display terminals you can get the left arrow by pressing the left cursor key; on TTYs, you can use underscore instead.

So COPY bar ← foo would copy foo, creating bar, and RENAME bar ← foo would change the filename foo to be bar.

Each file argument can be fully specified as

dev:file.ext[prj,prg]

dev is by default DSK: and does not need to be specified unless you are working with magnetic tape devices. prj,prg by default is the PPN you are currently logged in or aliased to.

The * wildcard means match all for the field it is specified in, eg *.txt. There is no partial wildcarding like a*.txt.

Some examples:

    RENAME *.BAK ← *.TXT

renames all text files in your current PPN to have an extension BAK.

    COPY X ← A,B,C

concatenates a, b and c to form x

    DIR MYLIST ← *.TXT

lists all files in the current PPN matching *.TXT and writes output to the file MYLIST.

There's also a working copy of PIP, DEC's Peripheral Interchange Program, on disk which you can run with R PIP. See my article in the TOPS-10 series of posts for more details.

The root of all directories is [1,1], also called the Master File Directory. If you do a DIR on this you can see each sub-directory as a file containing the PPN and the extension UFD, for User File Directory.

. dir [1,1]
...
  1REG  UFD    388  26-JUL-74
...
DOCREG  UFD    116  01-JAN-64
...

Some notable areas on the file system. As well as browsing these in WAITS, you can also look at the saildart archive by prepending https://www.saildart.org/ and either the PPN in brackets or the programmer number on its own, eg https://www.saildart.org/[S,DOC] or https://www.saildart.org/DOC .

The file manipulation commands are documented in COPY.RPH[S,DOC] in WAITS, or at saildart.org here.

We'll look at file protection, and user setup, in the next post.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com and I will add it here and update the main text.