All right, here's some things that I tend to remember FWIW (and my brain cells are starting to fade a bit): (and it is NOT a tree)
(1) I was definitely using a PDP-1 (18 bit) from 1961 through 1968. There was no operating system as such. I wrote a couple of them, one of which used DDT (which was a symbolic debugger, which I got to display on that nice DEC monitor tube). Would SpaceWar count as an OS? If you want a copy of the Java/Perl emulator of SpaceWar which runs on M$oft, let me know, and I'll send you a copy... (it's a link to MIT) (2) PDP-5's (12 bit?) didn't have much of an OS either. The above 2 were paper-tape based, although we did eventually interface an IBM tape drive to the PDP-1 at Princeton. That was used to "spool" listings to a 1401?, where I forced Autocoder to print the contents of the tape :-) My program (including the time slice interrupt driven code) ran over 180 pages of macro listing, which is why I had an interest in something faster than a flexowriter. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a mag tape on a bicycle... (3) PDP-6 (36 bit). That had a nice, time-sharing operating system. There was even a small disk, although it was primarily dectape driven. I'm sure one of you will chime in with the name of the earliest OS on the PDP-6; it eventually morphed into TOPS-10, and then TOPS-20, running on PDP-10, then 20's. There was also something called TENX, but I can't remember what that was anymore. (4) PDP-7 (18 bit). I remember that it had some kind of "Disk Operating System". Used to develop the earliest versions of UNIX. (5) PDP-8 (12 bit?). I don't remember much of anything about that, but it morphed into a word processor :-) (6) PDP-11 (16 bit). This was an awful machine. IIRC, it was the first of the DEC machines which used 8-bit, instead of 6-bit, characters; and the memory size was 16 bits, instead of the much heftier 18 bits in the PDP 1-4-7 family. However, despite requiring the programmer to learn hexadecimal notation instead of the much easier octal, it did catch on, and spawned a whole slew of operating systems: DOS, RT, RSTS, RSX-11D, RSX11M, RSX11M-Plus, among others. Mumps, too. How would you describe TKB? As a disk exerciser? The first manufacturer supplied computer virus? (7) VAX11/780 (IIRC, that was the name of the first machine, but I could be remembering wrong). The OS definitely evolved from RSX11; the utilities, as Dave Schmidt reminded us recently (on the VMS-SIG mailing list) all ran in PDP-11 emulation mode, and were the actual RSX-11M utilities, such as PIP and all of the RMS utilities (which, IIRC, did not go away until version 3, when we finally got a native-mode convert). (and case sensitive logical names, but no way to translate them until 3.2) ... Carl -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 11:16 AM To: Brad Hughes Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: vmsperl Digest 2 Apr 2003 21:19:24 -0000 Issue 685 Brad Hughes wrote: !Does anyone have an OS genealogy tree... The one at: http://www.levenez.com/unix/ is strictly Unix variants. There is no mention of VMS, although a Wollangong product appears branched off of System 6 in 1977 or so, and Ultrix I appears in about 1981. Peter Prymmer
