3 Mar
2026
3 Mar
'26
5:19 p.m.
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 <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> 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/