Code development for system distribution utility

I am on a trip in Austin, Texas at the Supercomputing 2015 conference all this week, but will have plenty of open time to code, test and do other 1130 design work. More, in fact, than I have been able to do lately due to demands from my employer.

RECREATING SYSTEM LOAD DECK AND DISTRIBUTION CARTRIDGE

I have asked members of the IBM1130 google group whether they have a schema to recreate more of the header cards, or even a source for the 100+ sets of text that came with a system distribution. A reader of this blog had suggested that avenue.

Another complication I discovered is the Reload Table, kept in sector 6. The way this is built during the load depends on a feature of the assembled object deck which is lost in the contents on disk. The first four words of each phase are special to the loader. The second words is the 2s complement of the phase number, the third is the displacement into the file where the SLET entries sit, and the fourth is the number of SLET entries that must be processed.

If the phase is going to be placed in memory at location /1100 then the object deck emits four words starting at /10FE, which are the special entries described above, then the second card of the object deck has data starting at /1100. This means that the data in /1100 and /1101, used to point to the SLET entries inside the phase, are overwritten by the first instructions. What I will see on disk is the data from that second card, not the four words from the first card.

Fortunately, I can recreate the first card for those phases that contain SLET entries. The Reload Table, contained in sector 6 of the disk, consists of three word entries for any of the phases that contain SLET entries - not all do. The first word is the phase ID of the phase containing the SLET entries, the second word is the relative address of the SLET entries inside this phase and the third word is the count of SLET entries to be processed.

For any phase that I find in the Reload Table, I will create the first card in the desired format, otherwise I will make a first card with /0000 and 0 for the SLET location/count. That way, my decks will build the Reload Table exactly as it exists. I will also double check all the phases for which IBM1130.org has source, to see which have non-zero counts of SLET entries.

I am pleased to see that my method should work, having tested it against a few different disks, as it was able to recover the Reload Table information for RPG whose source is not available online. While I think my decks of RPG and COBOL are complete, it is good to know I will be able to handle any system distribution.

I continued to code up the utility programs to recreate the distribution media while in Austin. Test, code more, test more - what a way to while away the idle time between sessions and meetings.