[inforoots] Spacecraft Pioneer and it's data on old media problem

[Carl Baltrunas]

Rafael,

It's an Interesting problem!

For my read of it, they don't give enough information, such as what old 
DEC computers are they using.
I'd be interested in knowing more, so if you have any contacts with the 
Planetary Society, feel free to
pass my name and/or email address along to them.

There are a LOT of people still around who know a bit about DEC 
machines, some who are on this list.
They mention FORTRAN-66, and file formats a number of times, and I'm 
curious what's so special.

TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 releases of FORTRAN-10/20 in the early 1980s were 
FORTRAN-77 compliant,
however I'm sure the early releases of FOROTS (available in the mid 
1970s) were not.  I could guess
that they were FORTRAN-66 compliant, since COBOL-68/74 was a major 
upgrade going on in the late
1970s with compatibility issues.  Prior to that, DEC used a FORTRAN-IV 
version commonly referred to
as F40.  This, of course was on the DEC PDP-10/20 systems.

On the PDP-11s, they had a couple of OS's, RT-11, RSX-11, and RSTS.  
I've programmed on all three
of these (RT and RSX, in both FORTRAN and Assembly). I'm not sure what 
they had available on the
PDP-8 or PDP-12 systems as far as OS's.  And I know they had systems 
with, 8-bit, 12-bit, 15-bit, and
36-bit word sizes, but do not know what would be so special about the 
file formats other than ascii or
bcd encoding in 6 or 7 bit bytes.  Even with FORTRAN-IV, you could do 
bit manipulations with logical
AND, OR and XOR as well as shifting (using multiplication and division) 
to manipulate various byte
sizes.  In assembly language on the PDP-10 you could use byte sizes 
from 1-36 bits, as part of the
normal instruction set.  Anyway, If you find more info about what they 
are looking for, let us know.  If
I have time to try and contact them myself, I'll also report back to 
this list.

-Carl

On Sep 28, 2007, at 9:13 PM, Rafael Skodlar wrote:
> Planetary Society has an interesting problem:
>
> http://planetary.org/programs/projects/pioneer_anomaly/20070831.html
>
> I can imagine a section in the museum full of working DEC machines 
> processing real data! That would be something!
>
> -- 
> Rafael
>