> On Jun 27, 2023, at 7:31 AM, Chris Zach via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Sounds like P/OS for the Professional. I've heard of All-in-One, but didn't
> realize they built something that was as bad an annoying as P/OS. I wonder if
> it included Prose as a word processor.
Different thing, I believe.
Various projects get mixed up in my head, but here are some pieces as I
remember them. Corrections welcome because it's quite possible I slipped some
bits.
There's ALL-IN-ONE, a VMS based business software system. It included, I
think, word processing and an email system, fancier than MAIL11 and not at all
appreciated by engineers but inflicted on DEC non-engineering personnel.
There's A-to-Z, which aimed to be something similar but small enough to run on
a PDP-11. ("A2Z" is not its official name but it isn't surprising to see that
appear as an internal marker in files.) I though there was a RSTS version of
it, I may be mistaken. Given that it ran on RSX it would not have been a large
stretch to build it on RSTS under its RSX runtime system.
There was also at one time the "KO project", called that because it was
apparently started under Ken Olsen's personal direction. That was a software
project to build something similar. I don't think what it produced actually
became ALL-IN-ONE but maybe it was. Among other things, it involved the
creation of a new programming language called KOALA. That could run on both
VMS and PDP-11 systems, so the theory was that the KO project output could do
so as well. In practice that failed utterly because of the "virtual disease"
-- those applications ran fine on a VMS system with adequate memory, but on a
PDP-11 with 64 kB address space they would page like mad and performance was
totally unacceptable.
P/OS is none of these things and the stuff I described above is much newer
(early 1980s if I remember right -- certainly well after I started at DEC which
was 1978).
paul
