Intel had an operating system (ISIS) and a language. I worked for a hardware 
startup and we used them. It was an embedded, bare-bones OS that could be 
burned into ROM, PROM or EPROM.

I remember the language better, having struggled with it many a late night. It 
was called PL/M, programming language for microcomputers. Ha! You can find 
anything on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/M and 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISIS_(operating_system) . (Did not realize it had 
been written by the late, great Gary K.) It had some quirks. ! (exclamation 
point) was the address-of operator, like & in C. Try spotting an extra or 
missing ! on a dot-matrix printer with a tired ribbon. 8-bit integers that were 
fundamentally unsigned but could be treated as signed. So you could say FOO=-1 
but then (FOO < 0) would be false because fundamentally -1 was just a synonym 
for 255.

Charles


-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf 
Of Tom Marchant
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 4:58 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: GREAT presentation on the history of the mainframe

On Thu, 23 Mar 2017 02:27:32 +0000, scott Ford wrote:

>One of my first sysprog jobs was on a 370-155 un-dated ..no dynamic 
>address translation ran Intel's DOS look-a-like.

ITYM IBM Disk Operating System, which predated Intel by years.
It is nothing like MSDOS. Did Intel ever have a DOS?

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