Interex closing down.

[J. David Bryan]

On 28 Jul 2005 at 15:35, Mike Gemeny wrote:

> I am not sure what it is, but it looks like RTE stuff.

The stuff under the "RTECSL" directory is the entire contributed software 
library for the 21xx series of computers -- from 2114s up through A-series 
1000s.  Over 2000 programs.  The later stuff runs under RTE, but the CSL 
has a fair number of DOS, BCS, and standalone absolute binaries too.  The 
first release (rev2001) contains all of the programs that HP had 
accumulated in their contributed library before they turned it over to 
Interex.

I've posted a list of the CSL programs and short descriptions, obtained 
earlier from Interex, at:

  http://www.bcpl.net/~dbryan/dropbox/csl-index.html

Note that the pair of numbers following the description references the 
associated FST file, e.g., program "AB2MI" has the codes "4230 B034", so 
it's in the file "rev4230_b034.fst" in the library.

In fact, one of the files (rev4030_z007.fst) contains the complete, final 
release of RTE-6/VM.  Unfortunately, you need an existing (if earlier) 
version of RTE-6/VM to install it on a bare system, and it's licensed only 
to run on HP hardware (i.e., no SIMH).

The CSL is stored in HP's "FST" archive format.  Fortunately, FST is near 
enough to "tar" to be readable (by GNU tar, at least).  Unfortunately, HP 
filenames contain characters that are illegal as filenames under most other 
systems (e.g., ">" and "<" are legal and common in HP filenames).  I've 
used tar under the Cygwin emulation layer for Windows and its "managed 
mode" file handling to allow HP filenames to be restored.  It also wouldn't 
be that hard to modify a tar source to do character substitutions.

                                      -- Dave