Once the CYBIS disk images, deadstart tape image, “cyber.ini” and the emulator binary have been extracted and/or built and PTERM has been installed the system is ready to run. Use the following steps to start up the NOS 2.8.7 operating system and then as a second step launch the CYBIS subsystems.

Start the Desktop CYBER emulator. Under Windows the firewall will prompt you if you want to allow the emulator to communicate on the network. Tick the appropriate network types (at least private networks) and then click on “Allow access”.

The emulator creates two windows (colours depend on host OS):

• the operator window (examples show white characters on black background);
• the CDC console window (green characters on black background);

The operator window is used to mount and un-mount tapes, show what tapes are mounted, remove printed paper, load and remove punch cards and to shut down the emulation. It allows the user to interface to the emulated peripherals in the same way as an operator of a real system. The emulated CDC console keyboard behaves like the real thing except for the following differences:

• Left blank key is mapped to “[” and erases any command line which may have been entered.
• Right blank key is mapped to “]” and its use depends on context. Often it is used to cycle through a set of console screens.

The screen shots below are showing examples of both windows:

The right hand side will update as the various NOS components are loaded until the following shows:

Here you have the option to enter the current date and then the time. As neither NOS nor CYBIS are fully Y2K compliant and parts of CYBIS make assumptions about valid date ranges I recommend to simply press Enter (effectively 97/11/05). Alternatively dates between 97/11/05 and 99/01/01 are suitable. After a few seconds you should see the following:

Now wait about 5 seconds for the NAM networking to finish initialising (i.e. the last line on the left says “IAF X. NETWORK CONNECTED.”) otherwise CYBIS may not start correctly. Now type “X.CYBIS.” followed by Enter:

After about 30 seconds it will show:

Wait until the last message on the left hand side says “LOCAL SYSTEM LESSONS INSTALLED”.

On the right hand side the following CYBIS subsystems should be running: MAS1, PLA1, FOR1, PNI1 and COA1.

If not all subsystems have started, then shutdown CYBIS as described in the chapter “Shutting down CYBIS” and if necessary drop any remaining CYBIS subsystems and possible dump jobs using DROP,jsn.. After all CYBIS subsystems have shutdown try starting CYBIS again with X.CYBIS..