MicroPLATO Pascal Course

On 19 Sep 2011 at 16:58, vintagecoder at aol.com wrote: That wouldn't have set well--I'd left CDC not six months earlier. What was remarkable about Airfight is that you were part of a "squadron" made up of other (remote) PLATO users and could send and receive messages during the progress of the game. Very forward- thinking for the day and completely missed by most of the mavens. I looked it up--PLATO used a comm link running at 1260 bps. That was slower even than the INTERCOM linkups, which IIRC, ran at something like 2000 bps. Even with the money poured into PLATO, it was less of a financial success than Ticketron (another CDC operation that arose out of the CDC-IBM litigation of the late 1960s. One tidbit is that PLATO ran under the KRONOS operating system. KRONOS was a derivative of MACE, an operating system written mostly by Dave Callender and Greg Mansfield--mostly late night on the QA floor at Arden Hills. Strictly a bootleg project, initially called MACE (Mansfield's Answer to Customer Engineering). The "official" CDC operating system for the 6000 series was SCOPE, which was heavily oriented toward batch processing. What followed was a product war of sorts within the company. SCOPE and KRONOS were fairly compatible on the user program level, but each handled internal operations quite differently. SCOPE was descended updated CPUs around. It was almost entirely resident in the PPUs. KRONOS, being a later system, used some of the later hardware enhancements and had a sizeable CPU component. Because of this, it could respond to an external request faster. KRONOS became popular among university customers who tended to use remote job entry and real-time terminals, while data center-type operations made use of SCOPE. Eventually, a move to consolidate both operating systems was made. Initially, SCOPE became known as NOS-BE (Network Operating System, Batch Environment), while KRONOS became simply NOS. While the final product was known as NOS, it really had components --Chuck