Back in the day, DEC built some deskside/desktop machines based more or less on the PDP8, using aftermarket CPU chips from Intersil. They were marketed as word processing systems, and had operating systems similar to OS/8, called OS/78 and OS/278. There were a number of variants, and they had a variety of names - WT78,VT278, DECmate I,II,III and III+ and no doubt some others that I'm not aware of. Hey, I'm a PDP-11 and RSX family collector - I don't know much about the 12 bit machines and their software - these names and OSes could easily be wrong or incomplete. Anyway, the word processing application they ran was WPS-8.
These systems could support a communication protocol called DX, that allowed them to transfer and print files to/from a host machine, and do terminal emulation to log on as a user. Truth to tell, I don't know which members of this family of products supported DX - at least some of them required an optional board, a DP278 , to enable it. There was also software that ran on the host machines to enable the use of these features. There were versions available for several of the PDP11 OSes - DX/11M (for RSX11M), DX/IAS, and DX/RSTS. Maybe more - these are the ones that I have heard of.
I had thought that the DX family of software was another lost product, but a couple months back, I was going through some old boxes, and found a copy of DX/IAS on a small 9 track tape. It might be of some interest, since it included the Fortran sources for the product. Although IAS is not widely used these days (or ever was, for that matter), the IAS system dependencies for this product look pretty minimal, and converting it to work on RSX or RSTS looks like it would be pretty simple. Usually, if there's no privileged kernel level code in an IAS program, and it doesn't use the timesharing subsystem, it's pretty easy to get it to run on RSX (and vice versa). Setting terminal characteristics usually needs a little attention, since the approaches to that are slightly different. If there's kernel level code involved - be ready for a challenge, since RSX and IAS are very different on the inside. But, there's none of that in this code.
These days, It's tough to find anyone with a 9 track drive willing to read tapes - and this was an 800 BPI NRZI tape - most hobbyists have the later, smaller tape drives that only handle Phase Encoded tapes at 1600 and 6250 BPI. I found a commercial site near me that could read 800BPI, at a charge of $75 a tape. Ouch...direct hit to the wallet...but, I hate to see a piece of DEC software disappear forever, so I bit the metaphorical bullet and got it read.
They only did a so-so job of reading it. Fortunately, it was in DOS-11 format, written by FLX on an RSX system, so even though the headers and trailers from the tape were horribly mangled, the contents of the files and the 14 byte RAD50 string that identifies each one came out fine. The contents of the tape were all ASCII files - Fortran sources, a command file and a Macro-11 file, made it easy to see what was what.
If you get far enough to need one, there's a manual on using the DX software available on Bitsavers
So here's the files from the tape. If any DECmate collectors get this to work on an RSX or RSTS host, let me know. And if you get it running on an IAS system, definitely let me know - since that means you're running an IAS system...
