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<p><i>A bit of things snipped.</i></p>
<p>I don't believe I've ever heard of Multos; I was using OS/8 and
TSS-8 in the early 70's before I got access to a PDP-10, which was
felt to have a more powerful and interesting instruction set. It
certainly floored some of my PDP-8 friends.<br>
</p>
<p>Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the total number of
operating systems across the board was amazing. For the PDP-10,
there was Tops-10, ITS, Tops-20 (TENEX) and WAITS (off the top of
my head). But the minicomputers were something else altogether.
Wow. I help managed the CS lab at my undergraduate college, where
we had a PDP-11/05 and an 11/45 (with a GT40). It seemed to me
that every time I turned around, I was tripping over another
operating system for one of them.</p>
<p>We had an RK05 with an early version of Unix (circa 1977). It
was looked at and summarily dismissed as "Interesting; needs to
get finished". We stuck with RT11 and RSX because they had more
functionality, were faster and used less resources. Little did we
know... Now, unless you are on an IBM mainframe, it seems you
pretty much get your choice of Windows or Unix. I've programmed
iOS (under Swift) and deep down, well, you know. Eye popping
graphics, though. We never had that. And pretty much infinite
memory.<br>
</p>
<p>None the less, there can be a lot of great ideas that come up
when you're doing something something from scratch and this is
particularly evident in the realm of file system syntax. I
continue to believe that DEC:'s grammar and built-in parsing is
superior to anything you can get on Unix, where all of that is
tossed out the window and you get "/". Windows, which will allow
you to specify a device (but not wildcard it) is only marginally
better.<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">I'm reminded of a talk that Rob Pike
gave at the turn of the millennium, "Systems Software Research is
Irrelevant". I don't agree with everything he says because I do
follow some of the research, but still, it's grim reading. What
I've found is that you can get some good ideas by seeing what
other people where doing whose backs were up against the wall and
what they thought they'd never be able to do (based on the
hardware restrictions).</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">
<p>That's surprising about no BLISS on the PDP-8. On my first day
at DEC as a Tops-20 programmer, we got stuck into a BLISS COMMON
class and received the corporate indoctrination. Then we went
on to design the File Finder project in MACRO. BLISS did get
used, particularly when something got tossed at us from another
platform. But I can't remember what major package was written
in it. Algol wasn't. There is a new part of Galaxy that I have
yet to fathom called "FTS" that is written in BLISS. I don't
understand the EXEC interface to it; perhaps there is a monitor
interface.</p>
<p>Has anybody heard of it?<br>
</p>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:cb3328a4-7617-74a8-0ae0-bf2091f02ad9@softjar.se">
<hr width="100%" size="2">On 12/21/19 5:22 AM, Johnny Billquist
wrote:<br>
<br>
There are actually multiple timesharing systems for the PDP-8. I
think Multos is way cooler than TSS-8.
<br>
<br>
The amount of stuff possible on the PDP-8 is nothing short of
amazing.
<br>
<br>
No BLISS for the PDP-8. DECnet-8 is written in PAL-8. <br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<hr width="100%" size="2">On 2019-12-21 05:21, Thomas DeBellis
wrote:
<br>
<br>
So they got DECnet running on the PDP-8? Wow.
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
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