1 Mar
2026
1 Mar
'26
2:09 p.m.
Well, I just learned today about the 1959 IBM term "squozed" (maybe some
comical combination of squeezed and frozen).
Apparently it was some kind of "compression" form of the punch card content
(maybe something more like "raw machine code" than source code? but in any
case, the intent was to help load/init the system faster) The term may
have been slightly before 1959, but I'm seeing it in some IBM catalogs of
1959.
-Steve
On Sun, Mar 1, 2026 at 3:53 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning(a)comcast.net> wrote:
On Mar 1, 2026, at 4:32 PM, Steve Lewis via
cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Well, to clarify - my "amazement" was more the idea of developing OS
software using paper (not as much the loading of one from paper, though
that is still a "glad I didn't have to do that" thing :).
There's a nice description, I think in Gauthier van den Hove's thesis, of
the process used for the creation of the world's first full ALGOL 60
compiler, by Dijkstra and Zonneveld. The two of them did this in about 6
months, which included having to invent a number of core elements of
parsing technology since they did not exist yet.
They would sit at a table, assembly language coding form in hand. One of
them would propose the next line of code, the other would agree or they
would discuss it if needed, and repeat for the next line. Those forms were
then handed to punch operators to be converted into 5-channel tape punched
in the odd code that the assembler (also by Dijkstra, part of his Ph.D.
thesis work) could read.
Amazing stuff. Also amazing is that, after several years of production
use, only two wrong-code bugs were discovered, both for highly exotic cases.
So I'd characterize early OS development
(meaning like 1956-1961) as:
developed "in memory" (e.g. CTSS is said to have been written in
FAP/MAD),
then the program exported to punch card (or
punched tape-- fan tape
being a
bit later and fairly exclusive to the
"DEC" ecosystem, as it were).
Once
verified "yeah this kind of works",
maybe that code quickly migrated over
to magtape (bearing it mind this was all pre-ASCII standards). But one
would need some kind of "bootloader" to then initiate it from magtape.
Early PDP-11 software development was done on PDP-10 timesharing systems,
including running it in simulation (MIMIC -- a precursor of SIMH). The
resulting bits would then go to paper tape, I'm pretty sure, to be loaded
into the target machine. That might in fact be a paper tape only system,
or if it was RSTS it would have disks but the initial OS load would be
paper tape.
Not all that long after, DECtape would typically be the OS distribution
medium. I'm not sure if those were created on PDP-10 systems; there was
FILEX to do that, but I don't know when that appeared.
By the time RSTS/E V5B arrived, development was on RSTS itself. I don't
know about V4A; system build (SYSGEN) used DOS, but it's hard to imagine
people doing software development on that sorry excuse for an operating
system.
paul