Fantastic, thanks for sharing that Paul ! I see "SOS" (SHARE OS) from 1959 and expected it was a similar workflow: initially on punched cards, intermediate fixes done on tape, then back to cards-- for a brief time, wouldn't tapes be a form of your storage space? so as you were "done" with the system - or a program completed and moved to the next batch-sequence - someone else could re-use the tape? (I recall earlier OS's, maybe CTSS, being like that -- if you logged out without saving your workspace, you'd lose it ) Then c. 1962ish, SOS morphed into IBM IBSYS. By that point, maybe nearly all the interactive development was done on 7 or 9-track? ( was there an 8-track? I think Univac had an 8-track at same point? )
I have seen the 1401 demo at CHM, so this helps put it more into perspective. -Steve On Tue, Mar 3, 2026 at 4:47 PM Paul McJones via cctalk < [email protected]> wrote: > As a student at UC Berkeley (1967-1971), I had a part-time job at the > Computer Center, which ran a CDC 6400 under SCOPE. We punched cards, > transferred them to magnetic tape, and used UPDATE to maintain logical > decks. I personally used this technology while working on CAL SNOBOL and > CAL TSS. Once we got CAL TSS far enough along to support development (on a > second CDC 6400), we switched to Teletypes (a mixture of Model 33’s and > Model 35’s). I still have source code for CAL SNOBOL because of archivists > at U. of Arizona and U. of Texas, but most of the source code for CAL TSS > was lost (listings survive). > > > Paul McJones > > https://www.mcjones.org/CAL_SNOBOL/ > https://caltss.computerhistory.org/
