On 01/03/2026 09:24, ben via cctalk wrote:
On 2026-03-01 12:34 a.m., Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
So studying about 1960s operating systems recently, it occurred to me
that
the ASR-33 wasn't really "a thing" until the late 1960s. Yes, they
technically existed since 1963, but even going through 1960s Datamation
issues - you don't see a lot of ads or mention of ASR-33 until 1965.
The IBM 1050 maybe existed in 1961 for the IBM 709, but even so -
general
thought is that CTSS (operating system) was largely initially developed
using punch cards.
Yes but that doesn't mean the whole OS ever existed on cards at a single
moment in time.
So - are there any archives or collections of these original punch
cards?
Or are they essentially all gone/destroyed, since in general after some
code was "perfected" it was likely then archived to tape?
It was written to tape as you went along.
Anyway, apologies - it was just something that only recently occurred to
me, that basically all of the original operating systems originated on
punch cards: CTSS, Supervisor, AOSP, SCOPE, even MULTICs. So - do
any of
those decks of cards still exist in archive? Would be neat to see a
photo
of those - except it would be a shoebox of punch cards like any other, I
suppose.
Like I say, generally you had a bootable tape. I did
Or is this wrong, and the top tier teams making these OS's, probably had
teletypes and all the magnetic tape they wanted?
-Steve
It was only the small guys like DEC that had TTY's.
The UK seemed to love 5 hole paper tape.
IBM was cards until the 1980's, like a on vintage IBM 1130.
7 track mag tape was standard until the IBM 360 came out.
I think in the UK there was a lot of CREED 5-hole paper-tape equipment.,
I think , possibly because of Bletchley.
In Manchester the original "Baby" computer was a 32-bit machine. They
recruited Alan Turing to assist with upgrading this machines from its
original seven op-codes to the more usable instruction set of the
Manchester Mark-1. He brought some 5-level devices with him from
Bletchley and they altered the machine to have a 40-bit word, so eight
5-bit characters. When Ferranti were contracted by the UK government to
build a production version , the Ferranti Mark-1, this machine was in
software terms identical, so was supplied with 5-level creed equipment.
This continued with Ferranti's successor machines. The next machine, the
Pegasus was interesting as it had a high-speed optical tape reader for
input and a 300cps punch for output. The output from the punch was
dumped into a large bin under the operators desk, from which it was fed
into a rather slower standard 6cps tape reader for printing on a Creed
5-level printer..
The high cost of core memory limited operating systems to be simple
batch systems until the late 60's.Then it was big money for time sharing.
The *Cloud* at 10 cps, never worked that well.
A lot of the stuff is somebody's intellectual property, thus it is
lost to the world for many reasons.
Ben.
Dave
