WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Frank J. Wancho) (09/04/86)
This message marks an historic moment, and a bit of background history
which has brought us to this moment is in order. Please bear with me
while you read this lead-in to details you have all been eagerly
awaiting at the end of this message.
Seven years ago this past Friday, August 29, 1979, INFO-CPM was formed
as a spin-off of INFO-MICRO, both homed at the time on MIT-MC. The
following month Keith Petersen's Royal Oak RCP/M system was
discovered, and Keith was invited to directly participate in the
INFO-CPM discussions. Through Keith's direct access, he was able to
upload, crudely at first, selected files for FTP from MIT-MC from his
vast up-to-date RCP/M collection. As new files became available,
Keith made the announcements to the INFO-CPM list. New contributions
and updates to existing files were likewise made available from other
ARPANET users. Thus, the CP/M archives was born, with disk space
courtesy of the MIT-MC management.
This activity caused the development of several mainframe versions of
CP/M utilities, such as the first mainframe implementation of the
Christensen Protocol, in MacLisp, by Ed Barton, called LMODEM. Then
Gail Zacharias developed MMODEM, USQ, HEXFIY, COMIFY, MAKLBR, DE-LBR
and others, some of which were modified for use on TOPS-20 systems.
Bill Westfield wrote the original and invaluable MODEM program for
TOPS-20, which has recently been overhauled into TMODEM.
Disk space was inherently limited on MIT-MC, and when the Macsyma
Consortium was dissolved at the end of September, 1983, SIMTEL20 at
White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) was already online and had disk space
to spare on the required 176MB RP06 boot disk. (SIMTEL20 is a
contraction of the name of the branch which then owned the machine,
SIMulation and TELeprocessing, DECSYSTEM-20.) During that month, the
CP/M collection was moved from MIT-MC to the RP06, designated as the
MICRO: structure, on SIMTEL20. Already purchased for a closely
related project, the then named DARCOM Microcomputer Software Sharing
System (DMSSS), were the entire sets of the CPMUG, SIG/M, and PC/BLUE
distributions, which were uploaded as-is to MICRO:. Since then we
managed to get placed on the tail end of the regional distribution of
both the SIG/M and PC/BLUE update sets which periodically extend both
of those collections.
As this was all going on, it became evident that a collection of
Unix/C versions of the CP/M utilities would be required and that
collection was started. That collection has since come under the
sponsorship of another organization within the Army Materiel Command
(AMC) to which WSMR belongs. That organization, Logistics Systems
Support Activity, LSSA, provided the funds for the 512MB disk drive
known as PD:, to which all the collections residing on the out-grown
MICRO: structure were moved in November, 1985.
In November, 1984, Rick Conn volunteered to start the extremely
popular Ada Software Repository, originally on PS: as there was no
room on MICRO:, and then moved to PD: when that device came online.
As with the CP/M archives in PD:<CPM.*> being considered the best and
most recent, the MSDOS archives are also in the process of being
similarly organized in PD:<MSDOS.*>, with files culled from the latest
releases of the PC/BLUE collection as well as the INFO-IBMPC
collections on ISI-B and Pete Galvin's collection on UTEXAS-20.
When the CP/M collection first started, there was only one directory
with subdirectories, and several not-necessarily CP/M-related
directories lived under that tree. Recently, a new top-level
directory was created on PD:, named PD:<MISC>. Now those generic
subdirectories in PD:<CPM.*>, PD:<UNIX.*>, and PD:<MSDOS.*> are being
moved to that new directory tree.
The original INFO-CPM list was maintained on MIT-MC until 1983 and
then moved to BRL, where it was maintained by Ron Natalie for a short
while. Ron, who has been the maintainer of INFO-MICRO, among other
lists, drafted Dave Towson to maintain the INFO-CPM list on AMSAA.
Dave has been continuously maintaining the list since November 1983,
periodically rewriting and distributing the SIMTEL20 Archive Users
Guide, commonly referred to as the "Archive Blurb" and answering
numerous user requests for information on access to the SIMTEL20
collections.
As the subscription list to INFO-CPM grew, it was gatewayed into the
USENET community, first as fa.info-cpm, and now as a two-way
newsgroup, net.micro.cpm. Later, members from other communities
joined the list from CSNET, BITNET, and others. Meanwhile, new files
and entire collections were added to the SIMTEL20 archives and
announced to the INFO-CPM list. Access to these files was inherently
limited to those with Internet FTP access to SIMTEL20, unless some
kind soul volunteered to mail selected files on request.
Recently, there was a flurry of messages pleading for some form of
automated access to the SIMTEL20 archives via net mail. About two
weeks ago, while reading these pleadings while on travel in the
mountains of Colorado, I said that all the pieces were falling into
place to be put together to provide that service. Maybe it was the
altitude that made me say that, but everything eventually did fall
into place in the two weeks since then.
A Mail File Server was written in C using a beta version of an about
to be released compiler for TOPS-20 systems. If it wasn't for the
quick turnaround on reported bug fixes by the two principal
maintainers of that compiler and run-time library, Ken Harrenstien and
Ian Mackey at SRI-NIC, this program could not have been developed in
such a short time by a person whose only other claim to fame in C
programming is one other C program he co-authored two years ago.
The original concept for this service came from a similar service
developed by Jack Dongarra of the Argonne National Laboratory and Eric
Grosse of AT&T Bell Laboratories called NetLib, which is available
from ANL-MCS for mail access into its collection of well-indexed and
documented high quality public domain mathematical software routines.
Their work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.
From their sources came that part of the package which extracts the
requestor's return address from the request file.
The SIMTEL20 version of this service has been in beta test for almost
two weeks now, with new features added and many bugs fixed since then.
While credits are being handed out, I wish to thank Matt Kimmel for
checking out access from the BITNET side, and Eric Hildum from the
USENET side. And, to Keith Petersen, Dave Towson, Bernie Eiben, Rick
Conn, and Mark Crispin for participating in a lively discussion of the
principles of operation of this service.
Now, before I bombard you with details on how to access the files, let
me caution you that this system is experimental. There is no such
thing as finding the "last" bug in any program. Furthermore, I sit in
awe and fear that even selective and judicious use of this system by
the potential audience this message will eventually reach may overload
this machine or some of the fragile mail links between hosts on the
various networks connecting us all together.
This means that those of you already with FTP access to SIMTEL20 must
not use this service and continue using FTP. There is no blocking
mechanism in place right now, but I will consider taking the time to
install one if you choose to ignore this request. Those of you on
USENET, BITNET, and CSNET hosts should consider appointing one point
of contact through which you should funnel your requests and the
reconstructed files from the replies from this service should be made
available to all your local users. This particularly applies to the
HELP, INFO, and BOOTSTRAP messages and the files they point to.
This message is being sent only to the readers of INFO-CPM so that we
can gauge the impact on the system. Please do not redistribute this
message to any other mailing list or newsgroup. Their time will come.
What follows is the message you get in response to the SEND HELP
command...
Enjoy!
Frank
--------------------
HOW TO ACCESS THE SIMTEL20 ARCHIVES VIA NET MAIL
To obtain one or more files by netmail from the public domain archives
kept on SIMTEL20.ARPA, send a message to:
ARCHIVE-REQUEST@SIMTEL20.ARPA, or via uucp:
...!seismo!simtel20.arpa!archive-request
...!ucbvax!simtel20.arpa!archive-request
...!uw-beaver!simtel20.arpa!archive-request
The message body must contain lines beginning with the keyword SEND,
one SEND line for each file requested. Case is not significant.
The general syntax of a SEND line is:
SEND format filename
In general, a filename consists of the following components:
device:<directory>file.type.generation
"device:" is usually PD:, and the combination of PD:<directory> is
expected unless an alias has been advertised of the form "alias:",
which takes the place of both device and directory fields. The
generation field may be left off and defaulted to the highest
generation number. "file.type" follows the usual filenaming
conventions.
In all formats listed below, if the file to be sent is larger than
55K, the file is sent in numbered parts. The parts must be
reassembled in order and edited to remove any headers, preface, and
trailers before the process can be reversed to reconstruct the
original file.
Allowable formats are:
SEND HELP
This file you are reading now.
SEND INFO
A detailed description of the SIMTEL20 Archives, which
includes this file, pointers to certain key files, and
descriptions of various file transfer programs and related
utilities.
SEND BOOTSTRAP
A brief quick reference listing of filenames of the key
utilities used to reconstruct files sent by the compression
and encoding techniques listed below.
SEND DIR filespec
This format returns a CRC list of the requested files, and is
the only format which allows wildcard filenames (but not
wildcard directory names). The list is sent as an ASCII text
file. The wildcard characters are "*" and "%". The asterisk
means any number of characters, while the percent sign means
exactly one character. Either or both may appear in any
combination in either or both the file or type fields, while
only the asterisk may appear in the generation field.
SEND RAW filename
If the file is ASCII, it is sent as-is, regardless of size.
This format is the least efficient over network and mail
gateway resources. Use this format only if you absolutely
must to get yourself bootstrapped. Then please use one of the
other formats listed below.
With the four formats listed below, if the file is ASCII and under 25k
characters, it is sent as-is, as if RAW format was requested. Binary
files are always processed according to the requested format.
However, a request for ARC or SQ processing of files with type .ARC,
.LBR, or .%Q% is ignored and the original file is either uuencoded or
hexified (if possible), according to the requested format. If the
file was not sent RAW, a short preface is inserted at the front of the
message describing the process actually taken and a CRC entry
describing the original file.
SEND ARE filename or SEND filename
The original file is made into a uuencoded ARC file.
SEND ARH filename
The original file is made into a hexified ARC file if the ARC
file is under 64K bytes long. Otherwise, an apology is
returned instead of the requested file.
SEND SQE filename
The original file is made into a uuencoded SQueezed file.
SEND SQH filename
The original file is made into a hexified SQueezed file if the
Squeezed file is under 64K bytes long. Otherwise, an apology
is returned instead of the requested file.
To get started in finding your way around the SIMTEL20 archives, send
another request: SEND INFO
The ARCHIVE-REQUEST address is serviced by a batch job that
reschedules itself one hour after it completes the current pass. That
frequency is subject to change.
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