I don't actually have a whole lot to report today, as I was busy with other stuff. As a result of this other stuff, I was going to be away from my computer, but I still had some time to code. Up to this point, I've been running the simh PDP-8 emulator locally on my iMac desktop, but as I said I wouldn't be at my desktop. Now, of course, I could have just remoted in from my MacBook Pro, but I decided to move my simh instance out to a Raspberry Pi so I could connect to it from any of my computers.
The other reason I wanted to do this is for the PiDP-8. You may recall me mentioning it in an earlier post. It's a recreation of a PDP-8/I with a Raspberry Pi serving as the brains, and it's being sold as a kit. I've actually opted to wait for an assembled unit in October, given that my current situation isn't conducive to hardware projects, but I'm very anxious to get my hands on it. As I said, it was part of the inspiration for this project. In any case, the kit's maker has released the software package that he's using so anybody can download and use it. As he readily admits, it's really just simh anyway. Of course, I could have just downloaded simh and built it on the Pi myself, but if someone's done the work for me already, why bother? Besides, the kit requires that you supply your own RPi, so I can just plug this one and continue using it when my unit finally arrives. So now I have a Raspberry Pi 2 on my network that I can ssh to from any machine and find myself in OS/8.
The other thing I did was to move my development files off of the main system drive and onto a floppy. Especially as I get more and more files, having a dedicated storage device will make things easier I think, and OS/8 doesn't have support for directories where I can isolate my stuff. I'd thought about just attaching a second hard drive, but I decided to go with the floppy once again because of the PiDP-8. One of the features it is supposed to have is to auto-mount removable media such as paper tapes and floppies - we're talking about images, of course. You put them on a USB stick and when it's plugged in and you flip a few switches, the PiDP-8 will search the USB devices and auto-mount whatever images it finds. It just loads the first image on the USB device, so you really have to have a single USB stick per image. But that kind of appeals to me anyway. I can buy a bunch of cheap, low-capacity USB sticks and then swap them out as needed - kind of like they actually were floppies or tapes.
Hopefully in the next day or two, I'll start getting into more productive Fortran coding.
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