Interlisp.Org connection?

[masinter]

See https://Interlisp.org and the GitHub Interlisp project.
The Interlisp sources have implementation of XNS, Courier, Clearinghouse and others.

We have it running in a Docker container on an AWS instance (https://online.interlisp.org).

[devhawala]

Hello,

i am experimenting a bit on my side with connecting my Dodo XNS services with some Xerox Interlisp systems. So far it works only with Lyric and Medley-1.0 running in the DarkStar emulator. Connecting with others than that fails for diverse reasons...

(remark: i am not a Lisp programmer in any way, my knowledge on how to use the Interlisp systems stems from browsing the Primer and some other PDFs found at Bitsavers, allowing me to enter very basic commands in an Interlisp-Executive window)

DarkStar with Lyric or Medley-1.0

For this, i use DarkStar 1.1.9.0 connecting directly to the Nethub (in a nutshell: the software equivalent of the thick yellow coax cable in the 80-ies) and the disk images for Lyric and Medley provided with DarkStar. My standard command to check if network access to XNS (Dodo installation in dist.zip with some files added to the "motu" file drawer) is finally working is:

DIR {fs1:}<motu>*

and then see if files are listed.

I had to experiment a bit with the lower level setup for the SPP protocol, as Interlisp seems to have a nasty behavior when listing large directories: when the Executive window lists a page height of files, it inverts to signal it is waiting for the user to do a "return" to display the next lines, but while the Executive waits, the SPP connection (more precisely the bulk-data transfer from server to workstation) seems to be blocked, not accepting more packets until the user presses "return" and apparently not even responding to system packets querying the packet queuing state! In the default setup, Dodo attempts a few packet resends and then considers the connection dead if no responses come back for system packets, so i had to increase the resend delays and max. resends to keep the connection alive for a reasonable time until the user decides to have stared long enough on the screen...

So at least the following XNS functions work for Lyric and Medley-1.0 on DarkStar: finding the clearinghouse, authenticate an user, find a file service entry in the clearinghouse and get its address, connect to the file service and list files.

Here's a screen shot:

DarkStar with other disk images
The emulator comes with other Lisp images, but:

• the Koto image seems to have no (or a broken) Lisp image, pressing STOP from the initial screen to start Lisp results in MP code 0915
• the Harmony image boots, but it uses the older version 2 of the Clearinghouse protocol instead of version 3: the problem is that the Courier descriptions that i found in the internet all stated that version 2 is same as version 3 except for the Authentication protocol version used, but this is apparently wrong, as accessing the clearinghouse for looking up the file service fails...
  (i had the same problem with Filing for StarOS, which uses version 4 of the Filing protocol, which differs from version 5 in some important data structures, despite the identical .cr files found in the internet; i'm not sure if i want to restart a new long running data structure guessing game to find out where the Clearinghouse protocol versions differ...)

Maiko

I looked at Maiko and Medley at the interlisp.org site. Not knowing how to activate networking, i looked in the sources to see how to try that and found the "ether.c" module, but reading through it (specifically all the #ifdefs) i understood that networking only works on Sun machines (and probably specific OS versions only?).

Not having such a machine (neither hardware nor emulation with a matching OS version), i postponed networking with Maiko. Are there any plans to extend network support to a standard intel/amd-cpu based linux in some more or less near future?

Ok, so much for my investigations on networking with Interlisp.

Greetings from Berlin
Hans

[masinter]

Maiko/medley XNS: see issue
Interlisp/medley#573

[masinter]

one possibility is to package darkstar and dodo into cloud services accessed via VNC similar to the way online.interlisp.org works.
See https://github.com/Interlisp/online for sources.