New System Load decks worked to build R2 V11 from scratch

SYSTEM LOAD DECK RECREATION

I made more progress on this front, finding the remaining decks that were punched from the distribution cartridge for a DMS R2 V11 system. The two major issues left were an exceedingly mangled loader part two (FP2) deck, a special version of the DISKN routine to handle 2311 disk drives, and a missing single card program to dump core to the console printer.

I found another set of cards that had a V11 front end, which was in pristine condition. I read that in and completed my set of load decks (except for the one card console core dump). I also located the single card program to dump to console printer.

My remaining challenge was locating the 2311 version of DISKN, something that wouldn't be needed on the 1130 systems I bought and therefore not retained by the owner. I went through the 75000 cards in my card cabinet, looking for the disk routine, and discovered it on the bottom level, sandwiched between some demo and games decks and unmarked. Fortunately, I knew the code in columns 73 to 80 for this deck. It is scanned and in place now.

I built a simulator file to load a fresh cartridge, numbered 0211, with the decks exactly as it would have been run by IBM. The result will be a bootable disk cartridge which simply punches all 25 decks, each section separated by a card with all 80 columns containing the 9 character.

My first run consisted of loading the standalone DCIP program, initializing the fresh disk on the first external drive 1, and labeling it 0211. I then mounted a good dms pack on drive 0 (internal disk), booted, and ran my deck to build the fresh cartridge. It appeared to load the cartridge properly with all the decks, but I got a loop when I booted that cartridge to attempt punching.

I did a quick single step and found a point where the code was doing a XIO Sense DSW for device 0, which is an error. I need to debug this further as it might be a flaw in the ZUCART program. Since it has never been tested with the simulator since the DMS system was recreated, there may be a typo or other issue.

I then set up a full system initial load of DMS R2 V11 from my decks, including RPG, FORTRAN, COBOL and Assembler. It went almost perfectly, except for some COBOL PTF (temporary fix) files mixed into the library routines, which also blocked installation of the RPG library routines. Still, the resulting system booted up and seems to work well.

Once I clean this up, I can redo the load and then test the four sample programs - assembler, FORTRAN, COBOL and RPG - to further shake out the performance of this cartridge. Once I am satisfied with its operation, I will apply my DMS R2 V12 system reload decks to convert this from V11 to V12, then test the operation of that version.