16 May
2024
16 May
'24
7:09 a.m.
I worked on the run time support for the early versions of Pascal on the CDC 6000
series. Depending upon the character set determining the end of line was a major pain.
There was a loop hole in the Pascal type system that allowed you to call any PPU program
directly from Pascal. It was not widely known, but it came in handy at times.
On Thursday, May 16, 2024 at 01:52:12 a.m. EDT, Chuck Guzis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 5/15/24 22:07, Tom Hunter via cctalk wrote:
I thought the CDC CYBER and 6000 series mainframes
were great systems which
performed admirably for what they were designed for. I liked COMPASS, SYMPL
and NOS 1 and 2. I didn't do much work in CYBIL, but it was basically an
enhanced version of PASCAL suitable for operating systems work. What is
there not to like? These mainframes and the CDC 7600 outperformed every
other machine until Seymour Cray released his own machines.
SYMPL was pretty new when I left the 6000 series behind. Much of the
code, but for some utilities was still assembly. FORTRAN (FTN) was used
for some simple things.
I worked on Zodiac, which was a multi-CPU COBOL (!) multithreaded
multitask OS written for USAF--very unlike anything CDC has ever had..
Lots of ECS and oceans of 844 drives. Special Systems Division was a lot
of fun back in the day. Lots of variety before they started cycling
down work at SVLOPS. My final years at CDC Sunnyvale were with STAR,
only to be resurrected in the 1980s with the ETA machines.
I think the ROVER people were among the last people at SVLOPS, but I
can't recall precisely.
A little factoid is that the 6000 series was very good at running COBOL.
--Chuck