Climbing up the RTE learning curve tailoring my system

HP 1000 SYSTEM RESTORATION

Working with RTE IV B

I fired up the machine to get more experience with the operating system. One of the investigations I undertook was listing the logical units (LUs) to understand how these worked in RTE.

First page of LU list

Second page of LU list

Once I believed I had a reasonable handle on things, I made some changes to my disk image (under simh, preserving the disk image I use on the real system). This involved doing an online system generation, which I eventually got to completion.

The last step was to run the SWTCH program which loads the new system image onto a chosen disk image. In my case I planned to just update in place, to better match the hardware I expect to use. While it appeared to work and comes up, I discovered that I couldn't run the FTN4 program (Fortran compiler front end).

I have also been fighting with the simh based HP2100 emulator, learning how to force it to do what I want. Discovered, for example, that when I was running the SWTCH command, it insisted that the disk FORMAT switch be on, apparently something that allows for a format operation. That needed a new simulator setting and rerun.