This seems to contain some good IRIS OS overview knowledge from the perspective of an experienced past user, (possibly) John L Wright, Jr from Arargh.com
http://domainiac.tech/reviews/arargh.com
http://www.whois.com/whois/arargh.com
Here are the IRIS-relevant extracts from that:
Arargh.com:
Another issue, do I write it for the only Nova OS that I have (IRIS
from EDS, later Point4) or standalone?
Also, write for a stock Nova, or the modified clone processors that I
have. The ones I have support 64k words of core, but you lose the
LDA/STA memory indirect chaining feature. But they will run as stock.
Toby:
Ooh! Please tell me more about that O/S. What are the chances of
getting a disk image to run under Simh? Do you have documentation? The
only Nova O/S that I have seen is RDOS (an image ships with Simh).
Arargh.com:
>Ooh! Please tell me more about that O/S.
Besides that it's long dead :-)
Multi user time sharing system. Apps programmed in interpreted basic.
System written in assembler.
>What are the chances of
>getting a disk image to run under Simh?
Slim, for several reasons. It is still under copyright, and has never
been released, AFAIK. Also, in order for it to run, there is a
license device, called a 'PICO', that has to be fastened to the
backplane. And they are version specific. The same kind of thing as
used on the parallel port for software protection for PC's.
Another issue is that all the copies that I have are setup for either
Diablo 44 Drives, on the DCC controller (Device ID 33) or Point 4 SMD
controller (Device ID 27). I doubt that Simh knows about those
controllers.
>Do you have documentation?
Of course.
>The only Nova O/S that I have seen is RDOS (an image ships with Simh).
ISTR that DG made RDOS avail for personal use. I don't know that to
be true for IRIS. That doesn't matter for me, as I have the licenses,
but it does for allowing anyone else to have a copy. I have
corresponded with someone who was trying to get IRIS released. I will
contact him again to see if he has made any progress. It has been a
few years.
Toby:
If you want any help, I'm happy to join forces. I can offer a colocated
Subversion repository for collaboration. Also another pair of coding
hands that likes compilers and knows Nova 3 reasonably well ;-) I also
have some rough notes[5] that I made when I was looking at lcc.
--Toby
[5] http://www.telegraphics.com.au/svn/dpa/trunk/nova/arch_notes.txt
(some of this may be out of date, incorrect or just plain silly. But
it's version controlled so you can check it out and commit any
corrections if I give you a login. Same goes for the rest of the
assembler project of which it is a part).
Arargh.com:
>Also another pair of coding
>hands that likes compilers and knows Nova 3 reasonably well ;-) I also
>have some rough notes[5] that I made when I was looking at lcc.
>[5] http://www.telegraphics.com.au/svn/dpa/trunk/nova/arch_notes.txt
>(some of this may be out of date, incorrect or just plain silly. But
>it's version controlled so you can check it out and commit any
>corrections if I give you a login. Same goes for the rest of the
>assembler project of which it is a part).
Most of it looks reasonable, except I have no idea about the lcc
parts.
The stack instructions only apply to the Nova 3 & later -- none of my
hardware has it. The FP instructions were always optional, and, of
course, I don't have them either.
IRIS used decimal floating point subroutines in 3 sizes with 6 to 14
decimal digits of accuracy.
Hmm, maybe I should grab that routine and add it to my basic compiler.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Peter:
> Another issue, do I write it for the only Nova OS that I have (IRIS
> from EDS, later Point4) or standalone?
Is it possible to generate code that will run either way, and have the
OS-dependent (or standalone-dependent) stuff in the RTL?
Arargh.com:
>Is it possible to generate code that will run either way, and have the
>OS-dependent (or standalone-dependent) stuff in the RTL?
I suppose. IRIS didn't have any notion of a loader or linker,
relocatable or otherwise. Programs were assembled at absolute load
locations, and used hard coded entries to "REX", (the kernel) for
various subroutine things, like keyboard input & output. Also, this
was a time sharing system, and programs had to check the time slice
counter, and swap themselves out, at the end of a time slice. (I don't
remember the details, just now. It's only been 20 years since I last
used this)
For example, IIRC, the command to write a string to the terminal was
"OUTTEXT", which was actually a "JSR @134" instruction. Loc 134 held
the address of the terminal output routine.
Since the various small-c compilers all output asm source, by not
specifying any location info it should be possible to do both. Then
for IRIS you could do something like:
asm cstart cbody clib
where cbody came from the c compiler. cstart would be the IRIS based
startup code, and clib would be all of the c library routines.
If I remember the assembler command correctly. :-)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Ray:
G'day Toby (et al) -
Quick notes:
IPT (Information Processing Techniques) sold a C compiler for Data General
Nova, Eclipse and MVs systems during the 1980s. It ran under the RDOS, AOS
and AOS/VS operating system, and generated code that could be used on any
Nova, Eclipse or MV.
IPT also sold a UNIX system that ran on DG Eclipse computers.
The IRIS system from EDS / Point 4 (Educational Data Systems) usually ran
nonstandard disk and multiplexor devices from 3rd party vendors, and SimH
does not [yet] support these devices.
Bruce
Bruce Ray
Wild Hare Computer Systems, Inc.
bkr@WildHareComputers.com
...preserving the Data General legacy: www.NovasAreForever.com
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