11 Jan
2007
11 Jan
'07
7:10 p.m.
On 1/11/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <f4eb766f0701101852o6cbdb164jcbfad1e195f1ab71 at mail.gmail.com>,
"Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> writes:
I don't know the answer to that in detail - I had a login, but I never
had to do any maintenance work on the 36-bit hosts when I was there,
but from what I can gather, CompuServe didn't write their tools in
standard FORTRAN - they had an extended FORTRAN compiler they called
XF4. There were also lots of home-grown libraries, and AFAIK, hooks
into the OS to make writing local utilities easier and more powerful.
It's a CompuServe-customized TOPS-10...
What was the nature of the extensions? From what I gather from folks that used to run jobs on
the system,
operators were invoking a system of custom-written utilities one after
the other for anything more complicated than DIRECTORY.
Here's a link to some company history written in 1988...
http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/compuserve.txt
-ethan