> On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
> one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
> around 1978 at SLAC.
>
> For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
> at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less
> insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high
> level languages would just get in the way and slow things down.
Depending on what he was trying to do that may well be a valid assessment. CDC
Fortran was known to be pretty good, but Fortran is not the obvious answer for
implementing interpreters or other language processors, which this sounds like.
> ...
> Getting back to the tape, I'm pretty sure it has Strubbe's PL/I like
> code as it is an archive of the PL/I conversion. It may also have CDC
> source, but that is less obvious until we can see the contents. The
> CDC source is historically the most relevant, and I am hoping it
> exists on the tape.
Just to make sure you're aware of this: if it is CDC source code, you can run
that on the DtCyber emulator. That's a full 6000 / 170 series machine emulator
which can run almost all CDC 6000 series software and operating systems. Not a
180 (for NOS/VE) system, nor an implementation of the 7600 architecture, but I
assume you're not dealing with peripheral processor code anyway. DtCyber is
open source; a fork of it has been running the PLATO system for over 10 years
now. Copies of NOS are also openly available (by permission of the owners, not
bootleg copies).
paul
