On Mar 3, 2026, at 4:29 PM, Paul Koning
<paulkoning(a)comcast.net> wrote:
On Mar 3, 2026, at 5:40 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).
It would be neat to OCR, or if desperate retype, those listings and bring CAL TSS back to
life.
paul
A fellow named Terry Heidelberg did an amazing job with a handful of surviving tapes.
Through heroic measures (I think he typed in programs from the listings, and patched
things like crazy) he got the ECS System (essentially the microkernel) booting and running
an interim command processor (the BEAD), but couldn’t get much past that (disk files and
the whole “user system” ran on that layer). So no subsystems could be run, etc. I recently
found a TTY printout of a session from around 1970 where I was demoing the system to my
wife by running a haiku-generating program written in CAL SNOBOL by Jim Gray. I’ve thought
about writing a blog entry annotating it: manual ECS quota maintenance, errors, restarts,
broadcast message by Dave trying to get Bruce to release ECS so Dave could do a big
assembly or link-edit.
Paul