A Permanent Network
It was no real hassle getting SimH installed and the PDP11 running with RSTS on my Chromebook (thanks to some help from Claude when I couldnt build the emulator!) but the version I was running (7) was a bit limited, and it refused to talk to any telnet requests so, as I have a Raspberry Pi 3B running my Paperboy AI agent, (Click here to be taken to the Paperboy page on my other site) naturally it needed to be installed there
After a bit of twiddling the emulator was running and I was able to telnet in as a normal user. It was so good to see it working, It took me back to the 80s when I was on a YTS scheme puzzling over relational database software that was so convoluted it made my teenage head spin!
So now I have a 'working' network what to do with it? I was a bit worried about poking too much with the [1,2] user as that has full admin rights and knowing me and my ridiculous curiosity, would break something. So I made a regular user [100,1] and set about seeing what I could acheive as one of the regular guys.
On boot, I was presented with a totally blank directory. I wonder what the onboarding was like back then? I remember getting a manual and a terminal and told to get on with it, this felt very familiar minus the manual and terrible coffee. A trip to the Interent Archive gave me the scanned manuals and a bit of reading on my tablet got me started with EDIT. This lead me to get an idea. How would it be creating documants using a 40 year old line editor?
Naturally, the only way was to find out and thats when I hit on the idea to write a short story. Well it seemed a good idea at the time!