[HECnet] Tops-20 ANONYMOUS FAL Preliminary Testing Results/DAP Query

[Thomas DeBellis]

/A bit of things snipped./

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Has anybody heard of it?

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 12/21/19 5:22 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>
> There are actually multiple timesharing systems for the PDP-8. I think 
> Multos is way cooler than TSS-8.
>
> The amount of stuff possible on the PDP-8 is nothing short of amazing.
>
> No BLISS for the PDP-8. DECnet-8 is written in PAL-8.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> On 2019-12-21 05:21, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>>
>> So they got DECnet running on the PDP-8?  Wow. 
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