• Re: Old printers, Architectural implications of locate mode I/O

    From John Levine@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 6 02:48:37 2024
    According to MitchAlsup1 <mitchalsup@aol.com>:
    We students, also, figured out that TSS had dumped OS process state in
    page 0 (un accessible normally) of the user's address space. We then
    figured out that while we could not LD or ST that data, we could queue
    up I/O (out) write the data to disk, read it back where we could diddle
    with it, write it back to disk, queue up I/O (in) and read it back into
    page 0.

    All we did was to set the privilege bit !!

    That was very restrained of you. I was only a visiting high school kid
    when I was using TSS at Princeton so I didn't push my luck. But ...

    We (students) used to have comment cards that cause the hammers all
    fly at the same time. So, instead of a natural z z z z z of the print,
    it would go BANG BANG BANG and we knew out stuff was being printed...

    Princeton had high end 1403 model N1 printers on the 360/20's they
    used for RJE to their 360/91. The /91 crashed a lot, and while waiting
    for it to come back up, we might have done some, ah, unofficial stuff
    pn the /20's, particularly once someone found a copy of the 360/20
    card assembler.

    On that model of printer could use different print chains with
    different sequences of characters, to handle upper/lower case and
    such. The printer had a Universal Character Set (UCS) buffer the
    computer could load to tell the printer what characters were where on
    the chain. So one day I wondered what would happen if I loaded the UCS
    buffer with all the same character, then printed lines of that
    character.

    Let me just say, Don't Do That. I think it blew a fuse before anything
    was seriously damaged.
    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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