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Looking for OMSI Focal Manual, UW Focal (UFW) binary or source

jackrubin

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Mar 12, 2004
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Chicago, IL and Buchanan, MI
DEC released FOCAL-8 (FOrmula CALculator) in 1969 as a tool for numeric problem solving on the PDP "Family of 8" machines. The language allowed extension and at least two additional versions were made available to the public.

OMSI-P/S8 FOCAL is available of Dave Gesswein's site along with an HTML version of the online help as documentation. The manual for Jim van Zee's University of Washington Focal (UWF) is on bitsavers and also as FOCAL8-301 from DECUS.

I'm trying to find the missing pieces - an OMSI manual and UWF source and binaries.

Can anybody help?

Thanks,
Jack
 
I came across this ancient thread while working on UWF. UWF is available as part of the PiDP project, and I have also rounded up various pieces and built them successfully. I'm still slightly confused about the huge number of add-on overlays and why some are in the PiDP build, but some are part of FOCAL8-301. Are the two sets supposed to be compatible? Are there versions of UWF?

Anyway, UWF is out there. Except that the non-EAE version is apparently lost. If you can find 8kfio and 8kfpp in source or binary form anywhere, we can probably fix that.

Vince
 
Thanks - happy to say that the scribe of that ancient missive is still alive and well. Sometime between 2015 and the present, I obtained an original OMSI manual which I suppose I should scan if it doesn't exist elsewhere. I also spoke briefly with Bill Cattey at the recent VCF-East about the missing non-EAE version but I'm afraid I can add nothing positive on that topic. Bill may have been trying to get in touch with Jim Van Zee but I don't know if he succeeded.

Jack
 
Thanks - happy to say that the scribe of that ancient missive is still alive and well. Sometime between 2015 and the present, I obtained an original OMSI manual which I suppose I should scan if it doesn't exist elsewhere. I also spoke briefly with Bill Cattey at the recent VCF-East about the missing non-EAE version but I'm afraid I can add nothing positive on that topic. Bill may have been trying to get in touch with Jim Van Zee but I don't know if he succeeded.

Jack
Always good to hear from you!

I updated my focal8-301 area today. Repacked the files into OS/8 byte order, and set up Makefiles to rebuild things.

I also set up a "pidp" sub-directory with basically Bill's version as well. I had to spend the better part of a week fixing differences/bugs in the cross assembler so that it would all cross assemble correctly. There's some very tricky code in there (forward referencing literals were the worst).

Vince
 
WRT the non-EAE version, I couldn't find any trace of source. It looks like the way forward there may be to take the old .SV file, and the EAE source, and converge the source to re-generate the binary. I've done this sort of thing several times to re-create the source code for obsolete or model specific versions of diagnostics, etc. This would essentially be treating the non-EAE version as a model specific version of Focal.

Definitely a ton of work; would take at least a week or two. Before we could start, we'd need to identify a U/W Focal binary that ran on non-EAE machines. We'd also need the EAE version of the same vintage, in source or binary form.

Alternatively, but not as authentically, we could use the EAE version as a specification and just replace all the EAE bits. That would probably be easier to get running, but wouldn't have any claim to historical accuracy.
 
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