Loading G&H floating point on -750 under 4.2BSD

[David Herron, NPR Lover]

Here is the problem.

Our -750 has 3 eagles attached to it.  We need to have the G&H
floating point available for mathematics researchers.  (For you
new-comers, G&H floating point is much larger precision than
the normal precision you get from single and double).  Our only
method right now is to re-boot VMS whenever we have a powerfail.
This is because VMS knows how to reload the floating point microcode,
but Unix doesn't.  That is our only use for VMS.  But to do this
we need to tie up one of our eagles.  And we're tight on disk space.
(who isn't?)

I've installed a boot program provided by Dec which makes the updates
to the microcode.  (Loads the file "/pcs750.bin" and patches it into
the microcode).

I have a Vax architecture reference manual.  But the only thing it has
about WCS registers is for the -780.

I have the tu58 tape the Dec man used to patch vms to load the floating
point.  He gave me an algorithm to use to read the contents of that
tape and get them to Unix.

So.  Do I have enough information?  Has anybody had any experience with
this kind of thing?

-- 
--- David Herron
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