On Tue, 21 Jun 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote: > > - It had some wicked cool "demos", to cop a C64 term. (ADC, PAC, EYE) > Those were mostly toys to amuse the CEs, like the baseball game BAT.
I was trying to find some video of one of those actually running. I wanted to see how the "calligraphic displays" painted the graphics. Do you happen to know why they went with two displays like that? Did the two have different purposes? > Chess 3.0 was implemented on Northwestern's machine and probably was the > first computer chess program of note. This was before kids thought that > computer games were *cool*. I never developed a taste for computer > gaming. Most folks I know who were in their 20s or 30s in the 60s or 70s didn't, either. However, computer games were the "hook" that got a lot of people like me interested in computing as children. I instantly became more interested in creating the games, not just playing them. I've known a lot of others with the same sort of instincts. > Much of the architectural concept was shared with IBM 7030 STRETCH > (another system worth researching). Hmm, I've never heard of it. I'll check it out. Thanks. > > - It wasn't DEC and it wasn't IBM and it was faster than both when it hit > > the street? > With a 10 MHz clock. Impressive. > It had several *cool* OSes, but really only two major ones for general > consumption (Special Systems Dvision had several more). SCOPE (later > NOS/BE), pretty much initially a PP-resident OS based on the old > Chippewa Operating System--and NOS (was KRONOS, originally MACE), I tried to find some info on SCOPE, but it's very sparse. Did it have an interactive command line? What was your main "interface" to the OS? > started as a "bootleg" project by Greg Mansfield and (Dr.) Dave > Callender at Arden Hills. (MACE stood for "(Greg) Mansfield's Answer to > Customer Engineering". Lots of great and interesting operating systems start as a reaction to the status quo or some idea they find abhorrent. UNIX and many variants certainly have. Ie.. Ken & Dennis working on side-projects while bored and demotivated by Multics, BSD guys reacting to AT&T clamping down, Linus reacting to his profs, Theo forking NetBSD, I could go on and on... UNIX: Born in rebellion. > Most batch programs written for SCOPE would run fine on MACE with few, > if any, modifications. Did Control Data sell both or was one from an alternative vendor? > In retrospect, CDC keeping two operating systems (SCOPE was part of CPD > in Sunnyvale, while KRONOS stayed home in Arden Hillls) was probably a > strategic blunder, since much duplicate effort was wasted. Eventually, > the two were merged into NOS (for Network Operating System). I found this PDF: http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/cdc/cyber/nos/60435400J_NOS_Version_1_Reference_Volume_1_Aug79.pdf It's interesting to me because of how "different" everything is. I'm not well versed in mainframe operating systems. It's interesting. > There aren't any alignment issues, since the CPU was only > word-addressable. This was when a character was 6 bits (think IBM 709x, > UNIVAC 1100, etc.) So a word with 10 characters was logical. I figured it was something like that, but I'm so used to 8-bit bytes and such. It takes a minute to adjust my thinking to a different base, but it's not that hard. > Given that PP words 12 bits (5 to a CM word) and there were 10 PPUs, > each executing at a speed 1/10th the CPU, it had a very pleasant sort of > symmetry. I suppose it doesn't matter as long as things factor out properly: no worries. > COMPASS was indeed advanced for its time, but then so was OS/360 > assembly language. Given that assembly was the lingua franca of system > programming, assemblers had to be good. Most of the readability was due > to attention to detail by the programmer, not any particular language > feature. Well, the sample code I could find was particularly well put together by someone who knew they were doing. I'm a pretty poor ASM programmer, since the only one I ever put much effort into was for the M68k (which is really easy compared to some). I've got a big crush on MIPS ASM but I never was any good with it. C ruined me. :-) > > ... Is super-readable, in fact, probably a bit more than several > > much-newer dialects on different platforms. There was one instruction > > "PROTECT" I found pretty interesting, too. > Where did you find that? I've never heard of such an instruction. I was mistaken, it's only a control statement for COMPASS. It's actually in the PDF manual I was just looking at. It's used to "preserve a user's ECS field length between job steps." -Swift
