RECREATING DISTRIBUTION DECKS
I continued coding the routines that will run through a system cartridge, using the SLET table to find and punch every system file as a card deck - very much like was produced by booting the distribution cartridge from IBM. That cartridge had a program, UCART, to punch all the card images, each phase or file separated by a card with all 9 characters.
My program will read in the phases from the system area and produce a card deck that is equivalent to the official DMS V2 R12 version. It is not identical for a couple of reasons. First, the header card in the IBM decks, which come out from UCART, contains text information about the module which is thrown away as the phase is loaded to a disk cartridge. Second, the object decks are output from the assembly, skipping areas that were coded as BSS (block of reserved locations) and starting a new card when an ORG card was present, while I will produce a tightly packed object module with every card but the last full.
Since the header text is gone, I can try to copy the headers of as many decks as I can find, either those phases for which I have a deck, or decks at other 1130 installations. These are human readable and not directly related to either the phase name or even the heading on the assembly, for those where I have source code. For example, phase 002 which is Job Control 2, with a sequence code starting J0212001 in columns 73-80, has a header card that reads:
" 1 SJB 02 11/06/73 DUP-CTRL RECORD PROCESSOR V2M12 J0212001"
One can guess that it contains the data of last modification, the initials of the programmer changing it, but also has a code '02' whose purpose is unknown. The heading entries in the source deck are of the form "DCTL -DUP CONTROL - COMMA " with various names after the second hyphen. Nothing in the source indicates the date of last assembly, nor could you create "DUP-CTRL RECORD PROCESSOR" from "DCTL -DUP CONTROL".
What I am confident about is that the results on a disk cartridge, in the system area, will be identical word for word between the cartridge I use as the reference source and any cartridge built using my decks. In that way, they will produce identical results on disk even though a card by card comparison of the IBM version and my output will differ.
The SLET table takes a couple of thousand words in core, the largest phase takes almost 5000 words when read in, and a table with the header text I want punched will take over 7000 words. The total, 14K, will fit on a 32K word machine but my physical 1130 where I will run the programs is only a 16K configuration. That means I have to get smart and optimize the program to conserve core - but I will do that in a second pass after I get the basic 'in memory' version functioning properly.
So far, I have testing and verified functions to read in the SLET table and to read each phase from the system area based on the SLET entry. While I am on my trip to Austin for the next six days, I will finish coding and testing the rest, then cutting it down to fit in a 16K machine. It is possible to skinny it all the way down so that it could fit in a 4K machine, but at the present time I don't see the need for that.
In the old days the 1130 programs would probably read the SLET one entry at a time.
ReplyDeleteSome old-time 1130 IBMers might remember what the other fields on the hearder card were supposed to be.
Well, a sector at a time - no way I know to ask the disk to give me four characters from within a single sector. The SLET is spread across sectors 3, 4 and 5 but on carts I checked, sector 5 is all zeroes. Likely it never expanded to a third sector.
ReplyDeleteI could read just one sector of the SLET at a time. Similarly, when fetching the system files (phases) to punch, I could read one sector at a time, punch the seven full and one partial cards for that sectors contents, and iterate until I completed the full word count of the file. The biggest phase I found as 15 sectors long, but most are much shorter.
I asked on the 1130 google group to see if anyone has information on the header cards.