[cctalk] Re: Operating system, on punch cards?

On Mar 3, 2026, at 5:19 PM, Steve Lewis &lt;lewissa78(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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 &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@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/