24 Apr
2006
24 Apr
'06
9:41 p.m.
If I recall DOS was the single user OS they picked up from the
government (MIT & NASA?). The multi-user version of it was Primos III
for the Prime 300, and then Primos IV was the breakthru with big
virtual memory space and a lot of other advanced (for then) and
Multics derived features.
On 4/24/06, Dennis Boone <drb at msu.edu> wrote:
Also, I
wouldn't think the OS tapes for the 2550 would work on the
750 which is a much older system. But, I really don't know!
There were not, during the period I worked on Primes, variants for
different hardware. Once Primos started supporting a new type of
hardware, it rarely stopped -- backwards compatibility was one of
the albatrossen which sank the company, IMHO. Even the hardware had
the disease. How many architectures do you know of which had working
support for 7 or 8 completely different addressing models, complete
with the predictable effects on the assembler language? The machines
I worked on in the mid-late 80s still had 16S mode support, which if I
understand correctly, was essentially the architecture Prime inherited
from the old H316/516 machines used in the early Internet IMPs.
There are older machines which were NOT 50-series hardware, which ran
some older ancestral version than the Primos IV which ran on the -50s.
But Primos IV for 50 series should run on virtually anything from a
250 on up.
Those tapes should work just fine on a 750, if they're readable at all.
De