1 Mar
2026
1 Mar
'26
1 p.m.
On Sun, 2026-03-01 at 14:47 -0500, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
I used a Bendix G-15 in 1963. It didn't really have an OS, but it did
have a simple one-address interpreter called INTERCOM that included
floating point and math functions. All on paper tape.
On Mar 1, 2026, at 2:34 AM, Steve Lewis via
cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
...
Anyway, apologies - it was just something that only recently
occurred to
me, that basically all of the original operating systems originated
on
punch cards: CTSS, Supervisor, AOSP, SCOPE, even MULTICs.
That's certainly not true. It may be true for card-centric outfits
like IBM. I don't know what early DEC development looked like, but
considering the rarity of card handling equipment on DEC systems I
would expect paper tape.
Early software for the Dutch machines I know was done on paper tape.
In some cases that involved punch equipment with custom-designed
coding; for example, the Electrologica X1 had a rudimentary assembler
in ROM (along with a BIOS) and source text was given to it on 5-
channel paper tape, in a code slightly above straight binary machine
language.
Its successor the X8 had paper tape I/O standard, and the standard
executable file loaders used paper tapes. Ditto the bootstrap. The
famous THE operating system was a paper tape batch system, with the
OS image supplied on tape (though I think at some point it was moved
to magtape for faster startup). No punched cards were seen there
until the X8 was replaced by a Burroughs 6800, circa 1974, and even
that machine had paper tape input to support all the applications
that had the input data on paper tape. My father's precision
measurement lab (part of the ME department) had instruments that
punched the measurements onto paper tape, for later processing by
that central computer system. All that was in ALGOL, by the way.
paul