Subject: Re: fuzzball

From: [email-masked] (John Wilson)
Date: 28 Aug 1994 16:21:10 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>, Megan <[email-masked]> wrote:
>A few months ago, I contacted someone (I forget who) and was actually
>able to get a copy of the fuzzball software.

I got it from him around the same time, it was Dave Mills, the same guy
who wrote the paper (and Fuzzball itself, or at least the majority of
it).

>I'd have to contact him as well to find out if I can pass it on (if so,
>maybe we can get it into the various pdp-11 archives).

I asked him back when I got my copy and he said he has no problem with
it being distributed, although of course the DEC stuff that's mixed in
with it would have to be weeded out.  Fuzzball (or Fuzzware, or BOS, or
DCN, or whatever) sounds at least superficially like TSX+ (only with
TCP/IP built in), it's compatible with RT and borrows all its utilities,
and it isn't self-booting so it must be run as a program from a running
RT system.

I never got around to trying a build, I figured Kermitting it to my
11 simulator was a cop-out and that first I should write a program to
hack RT-11 file systems and LD:'s, and now that that's done I'm totally
swamped in other projects, some of which require good weather which
will be ending soon...

Anyway the problem is I have it on my PC, which isn't on the net, and
it's pretty huge (probably 20MB-ish after weeding out the RT utils),
so Kermitting it somewhere would be a huge job.  I think it could be
smaller, but he just gave us dumps of his disk backup tapes because he
didn't have time to sort through it, it's not his problem.

If a home can be found for this stuff and someone who's on the net can
read QIC-80 tapes I'd be happy to send them a tape (if possible I'd
like the tape back afterwards).  Wherever it ends up we should be sure
to plaster Dave Mills's name all over it, he seems to have forgotten to
give himself credit for writing it (unless questioned directly) and he
had a very good attitude about giving it out.  It looks like a very
nice job, I can't wait to run it.  If we got motivated and did a GNU-like
job of writing free versions of all the RT-11 utilities, and wrote a
bootstrap for it, then it could be a completely free multiuser OS,
way cool.

John Wilson