NDWiki:Community Portal

Welcome to the community portal!

This is the place to find out what is happening on NDWiki. Please add your thoughts to these open discussions. Use a colon (:) at the beginning of each paragraph to indent your responses (and two colons to respond to something already indented, so on and so forth), and sign your response with ~~~~.

5-year anniversary! We celebrate with a 100 Mbit/s connection to the wiki!

I missed the anniversary with a month, gah! But now the server got a 100 Mbit/s fiber connection! Enjoy! /Mike (talk) 19:48, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

NDWiki moved to a new server

Due to unforeseen circumstances, NDWiki went offline sometime in 2015 (April?). Efforts were made by parties involved to get it back online again, but failed. A year later (April 2016), discussions on how to remedy the situation was started. As I had available time, I offered to set up a server to run to wiki on, and manage it. I only have a "normal" broadband connection at home, which means a dynamic IP address. This is not ideal for running a server, so I asked my local makerspace, Bitraf, if I could host the server there - they were willing and agreed. All this took a while, but in the middle of May 2016 I set up the server, installed the necessary software, restored the backup and started fixing stuff that didn't work (some templates, images not showing). Most of the problems were due to my lack of experience with configuring Mediawiki and the software it needs. Anyway, on May 24th, 2016 NDWiki was ready for use again. Enjoy! Torfinn (talk) 13:45, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

600 articles!

This wiki now has 600 articles (or pages if you like)! Torfinn (talk) 19:52, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

MON 15

I just joined NDWiki and would like to contribute. I have not found any doc on MON 15 which is used by NPL, MAC and QED. Years back I tried to find out what this monitor call wa doing. In my emulator I have this notes:

Old undocumented monitor call, used by NPL/MAC/QED in connection with old open file
  These programs invoke this monitor call using instruction code 161015 octal
  X points to data area to set up
  T is a pointer and is used as a parameter to set up the data structure
  D indicates the buffer length in bytes

Establish data structure to be used by MON 20 Then used by MON 42 to open file (old open)

Carl-Victor Sundling

Ref. the undocumented MON 15. I was trying to figure out the moncall myself some years ago. The last information I found was from (from my notes) 'the TSS manual', which must have been Norsk Data Document ND–60.039.01 REFERENCE MANUAL FOR THE NORD TIMESHARING SYSTEM

So it looks like it was a moncall in NORD-TSS (TimeSharing System) and may have been backwards supported in SINTRAN due to those old tools. If it is the same call. I suspect it is, although I'm not sure if the full functionality of the old one is there - if it only needs to work with NPL/MAC/QED then maybe it doesn't. See below for what I basically copied from the TSS manual. Thanks for bringing it up, it reminds me that we need to work on the documentation for monitor calls.

--TArntsen (talk) 07:50, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

SETUP - Generate a string descriptor
 X = address of string descriptor (5 word object)
 T = location of string
 AD = maximum size of string in bytes
 Descriptor:
   4 character pointers:
     beginning pointer
     end pointer
     reader pointer
     writer pointer
    A string is the characters between the reader and writer pointers.
    reader <= writer and both pointers must be within beg/end
SETUP seems to take T and A and write a descriptor to (X), with reader=writer=beg

Instruction test program

Does anyone have a :BPUN file of the instruction test program? I would like to have it to test my emulator. The idea is to replace the IOX instructions for terminal input/output with MON 1 and MON 2. I have tried to find a floppy image with the instruction test program (and use ndfs) to extract it, but without success so far.

Try this one: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6x2vw7cquaa3b7o/10523D01-XX-01D.image.gz It includes INSTRUCTION-B:BPUN. But note that this test program needs a nearly fully functioning emulation of 16 interrupt levels, ION/IOF instructions, etc. TArntsen (talk) 10:04, 19 May 2019 (UTC)