18 Apr
2019
18 Apr
'19
4:41 p.m.
On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 5:11 PM Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
I know I ran BASIC-Plus, TECO and RT-11 binaries (FORTRAN code) on the
RSTS/E system I started out on (6C or 7.0, iirc). We also had some RSX-11
binaries too for something I've long-ago forgotten.
On Apr 18, 2019, at 3:06 PM, Warner Losh <imp
at bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 12:41 PM Dan Veeneman via cctalk <
cctalk at
classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 4/18/2019 2:27 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk
wrote:
> my memory is that DSM-11 is an operating system all its own, not just
a
language processor running on top of a standard OS like RSTS.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we used DSM running on VMS 4.7 for a
nationwide (United States) mortgage credit reporting system.
The big claim to fame for RSTS/e was I thought that it let you load
'foreign' executives so you could run RT-11 or RSX-11 or whatever binaries
all on one system. I'd imagine DSM-11 images would be easy if it were a
real OS. I'd always thought of RSTS/e as a poor-man's hypervisor. But maybe
I'm misremembering how much it could do...
Poor man's hypervisor, I like that.
That's reasonably accurate. RSTS/E had "run-time systems", originally the
interpreter, support library, and user interface of the BASIC-PLUS language
machinery. Starting in, I think, RSTS/E V5B, it was generalized step by
step to become a collection of such things: a user interface, execution
environment, and other stuff. It might be very narrowly tailored, like the
TECO run-time system, it might be the interpreter library for a language,
like the FORTH and ALGOL run-time systems, or it might be a fairly complete
emulation of a different OS, like the RT11 and RSX run-time systems.
I first used a very primitive version of this feature
in V5B around 1975,
to run an assembly language program before there was any general RSTS
support for doing that.
Yea, I couldn't recall if it was tailored or generic. I think it was, as
you say, tailored from massaged versions of the original executives, iirc,
but maybe they were reimplementations like the crazy glue code that we had
at university that was an RT-11 .SAV file with some weird glue to make it
run in 7th Edition Unix that we ran on a VAX 11/750 using the pdp-11
emulator hardware it had...
Warner