Project Note No 10: Notes on meeting held on 3 March 1975 and record of current position
F R A Hopgood
6 March 1975
1. FR80 ACCEPTANCE
The acceptance tests on the FR80 to be done by RET and PMN have been
delayed because of a number of hardware problems. Regular telephone
calls to Los Angeles have kept us in touch with progress. The main
points about the hardware are as follows:
- There have been a large number of small faults on the FR80 which
imply that III have had insufficient time to set up the machine.
A servo motor on one of the tape decks needed replacing. The
teletype was late in arriving. At least one wiring fault was uncovered.
- The major problem has been misalignment of images on all cameras.
After a lot of work this was finally tracked down to the tube
moving inside the collar. III had not designed a new collar for
the Lytton tube but were using the old one designed for the Ferranti tube.
- There is still a fault which appears as a thin line on the 35mm
image, It is not apparent on hardcopy and is outside the 16mm image area.
- The beam current required for the 35mm camera is high at 8 × 25.
III are attempting to confirm that Lytton do not regard this as
too high. This appears to be due to the distribution of the
light output across the spectrum rather than a low output level.
It has been possible to get acceptable colour output at only
2 hits, Attempts to produce white output using the CLEAR filter
have been less successful than using the three filters separately.
The CLEAR filter does cut out a significant amount of light and
it is necessary to disable the filter when Black and White output
is being generated.
The aim was to start the acceptance tests on 4 March and finish them
by 7 March.
2. FR80 SOFTWARE
Discussions with III by RET have resolved a number of outstanding
software queries and have raised many others. The main points are:
- III were aware of the problem that simple filemarks could not be
generated on IBM standard labelled tapes. Each filemark is
followed by a trailer record and a second filemark. This makes
it virtually impossible to run Load and Go tapes produced on the
360/195 without some modification to Load and Go. III's initial
reaction was to ignore the problem but later they agreed to look
into it.
- Apart from the III Standard font, a large number of characters do
not join up. This is not apparent when the characters are output
in a small size. However, the characters do break up as soon as
they become at all large, These fonts are not very useful for
software generation in the FR80. Also, the form of certain
characters can be quite bizarre when expanded to a large size.
- III have agreed to produce the £ character in the fonts
to be
provided with the system.
- RET has blown-up diagrams of all the characters in the fonts
provided with the system.
- The FR80 Displayer provided by III does not contain the proportional
spacing routines (they are claiming that this is a COMP80 facility).
- The ENDJOB command does not appear to reset anything.
- The STARTJOB command does not reset the COMIC/CINE mode. Initially,
the 35mm camera is assumed to be recording in COMIC mode.
- The 1900 Print Program is written and working. A problem with
carriage control characters for amorphous files was encountered.
This has currently been resolved by insisting that at least one
line-feed is always generated. Long lines of more than 120
characters were being generated incorrectly. A newline will be
inserted after 120 characters.
- Only 1900 print programs cannot be used with Load and Go.
- The FR80 Displayer code is now frozen and no additions are likely
to be made. The unimplemented orders will not be produced. III
are concentrating on COMP80 and microfiche software.
- A version of the PDP15 FR80 assembler has been obtained.
- Symbol table information is available with binary programs.
- RET has managed to get a symbolic listing of an FR80 Displayer
using DEBUG. It took 5 hours.
- The first two records of header information in the Load and Go
system can be less than the maximum size.
- RET has added an FR80 command for changing vector speed.
- An outline version of an FR80 accounts program has been written
but not tested.
3. PICTURE FILE STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL IN SMOG
The following changes have been made to the definition of SMOG:
- The routine FRSAV(X) will define a picture on the FR80 and open
a file for other devices. Up to 64 of these temporary pictures,
numbered 0.0-63.0, may be used.
- The routine FISAV finished saving a picture.
- The routine DRAWNM(X) will draw picture number X previously saved
by FRSAV/FISAV. If X is greater than 63.0, the permanent picture
X-64 on the FR80 will be drawn. Nothing will be drawn on the
other devices if X is greater than 63.0.
- The routine RDLIB('STRINGA' ,'STRINGB') will read standard background
data generated by the package 'STRINGA' held in picture file
'STRINGB'. The background information is held in a common block
called SMOGLB. If RDLIB is used, the program must contain a
COMMON statement allocating sufficient store for the background
information. Subsequent calls of RDLIB cause the previous data
to be overwritten. Thus only one such background can be held at
any one time. However, a background could be transferred to the
FR80 as a temporary picture by means of FRSAV/FISAV.
- The routine DRAWNM(X), where X is negative, causes the current
background to be drawn. For example:
COMMON/SMOGLB /DUMMY (1000)
RDLIB('SPROGS','PHOTO')
FRSAV(3.0)
VEC(1.0,2.0,3.0,4.0)
FISAV
DRAWNM(-1.0)
DRAWNM(3.0)
This reads the background from the picture file 'PHOTO' generated by the
SPROGS package. It then generates picture number 3 and draws the background
and picture 3.
4. PROGRESS
The progress of work was reviewed at the meeting in relation to the
chart in Project Note 9,
4.1 SPOOL (JRG)
The system has managed to produce a tape with a job on it for a particular
camera. All the basic coding has been done. Headers are being output
correctly. Some work still needs to be done on the print-out for the
operators. The code which frees a Job area on the disc needed to be
tested. Also, the system has not been tried under :MANAGER.
4.2 SMOG (AHF,PAD)
The text routines for both the FR80 and Tektronix had been completed.
The LIMITS routines for all the cameras have been defined. DVALL
is being worked on and should be ready in the next week. The
INTEGER routines are working as well as those for graticule production.
FRSAV has been defined for FR80 outpuL but not for any other device.
SMOG should soon be available for use on the 1906A. It was decided
that a compendium of the existing documentation on SMOG would be
produced. This could be used as a rough manual for people wishing to
modify internal systems. It was agreed that DVR would contact the
package implementers. It was also agreed that work should start on
the SMOG manual.
4.3 ID Frame (DVR)
The format of all the ID Frame variable information has been produced
and distributed. Work on the version of SCFOR in SMOG is progressing.
It was agreed that this would use the text routines currently available
in SMOG even if characters did come out the wrong size at the moment.
4.4 Tektronix VIEW (AWB)
Coding for this is virtually complete and debugging should be completed
in the next two weeks.
4.5 SMOG on the 360/195 (MFC)
It was decided that the main effort should be towards getting a version
of SMOG working initially. A handler to output FR80 orders has been
written. AHF agreed to give MFC a list of the machine code routines
required for SMOG. A version of SMOG itself should be available for
MFC in about a week.
SPROGS (Version 2.5) has been implemented. No more work on Version 3
will be done until SMOG has been completed.
4.6 FR80 Displayer (WDS, FRAH)
Work is continuing on understanding the FR80 Displayer Code. It looked
as though it would be relatively simple to patch the program to allow
character sizes to be specified greater than 63. These could increase
quadratically so that a size of 255 was equal to a raster size of 16383.
A program has been written for the PDP15 which will decode an FR80
program and produce a listing with the correct mnemonics. This will
eventually be extended to incorporate symbolic information and comments.
At that stage, it should be possible to produce a decompiled version of
a program which could be modified and re-input to the FR80.
4.7 PDP15 VIEW (JMR)
The basic VIEW program was available and would eventually be replaced by
a "deluxe" version. The only commands being used which were not
decoded were the SELECT COLOUR ones. It is possible that an option
will be provided to allow a user to view a single colour.
5. IMPLEMENTATION DETAILS
5.1 Camera Names
A set of camera names was needed by the SPOOL system in its operator
commands. They were also needed in SMOG for camera initialisation.
The set of names agreed was as follows:
CL16 combined camera, 16mm colour output
BWl6 combined camera, 16mm black and white output
CL35 combined camera, 35mm colour output
BW35 combined camera, 35mm black and white output
PR16 precision 16mm camera
MFCH microfiche output
HCM HARDCOPY (many-up)
HCS hardcopy (single)
HCMS hardcopy (many-up and single together)
5.2 Permanent Pictures
It was agreed to use the first four permanent pictures to define the
ID frames as follows:
1 16mm ID frame
2 Large ID frame
3 Resolution sub-picture for 16mm ID frame
4 Resolution sub-picture for large ID frame
It was agreed that CINE/COMIC mode would be set by each package
immediately after STARTJOB and before outputting the permanent picture
and variable ID information.
6. COURSES
Due to late delivery of the FR80, the programming and operating courses
will have to be postponed. It is now confirmed that these will be on
the following dates:
Programming Course 7 - 11 April
Operating Course 2 - 8 April
7. PDP15
The DECwriter and fast interface to the Tektronix have been installed.
It is possible to read and write files containing upper and lower case
information using the DECwriter. WDS is now in charge of the PDP15
and its peripherals. Any hardware faults should be notified to him and
it is his responsibility to contact the engineers and ensure that the
fault is corrected.
8. LATEST POSITION - 7 MARCH
Acceptance tests on the FR80 started late Wednesday and continued
through the night. So far, they have been progressing without any
problems. PMN is due to arrive back on Saturday 8 March and RET on
Sunday 9 March. Additional software points discovered are:
- The SELECT COLOUR command and double buffering are incompatible.
If more than one colour is selected at a time in a single SELECT
COLOUR command, it is not possible to double buffer.
III are providing a single-buffered program for colour output.
This could mean changes to all the systems.
- Load and Go does not allow a filemark immediately after the two header blocks.
