22 Jun
2016
22 Jun
'16
8:32 a.m.
On Tue, 21 Jun 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I was trying to find some video of one of those actually running. I wanted
to see how the "calligraphic displays" painted the graphics. Do you happen
to know why they went with two displays like that? Did the two have
different purposes?
Impressive.
I was mistaken, it's only a control statement for COMPASS. It's actually
in the PDF manual I was just looking at. It's used to "preserve a user's
ECS field length between job steps."
-Swift
- It had some
wicked cool "demos", to cop a C64 term. (ADC, PAC, EYE)
Those were mostly
toys to amuse the CEs, like the baseball game BAT. Chess 3.0 was implemented on Northwestern's
machine and probably was the
first computer chess program of note. This was before kids thought that
computer games were *cool*. I never developed a taste for computer
gaming.
Most folks I know who were in their 20s or 30s in the 60s or 70s didn't,
either. However, computer games were the "hook" that got a lot of people
like me interested in computing as children. I instantly became more
interested in creating the games, not just playing them. I've known a lot
of others with the same sort of instincts.
Much of the architectural concept was shared with IBM
7030 STRETCH
(another system worth researching).
Hmm, I've never heard of it. I'll check it out. Thanks.
- It
wasn't DEC and it wasn't IBM and it was faster than both when it hit
the street?
With a 10 MHz clock. It had several *cool* OSes, but really only two major
ones for general
consumption (Special Systems Dvision had several more). SCOPE (later
NOS/BE), pretty much initially a PP-resident OS based on the old
Chippewa Operating System--and NOS (was KRONOS, originally MACE),
I tried to find some info on SCOPE, but it's very sparse. Did it have an
interactive command line? What was your main "interface" to the OS?
started as a "bootleg" project by Greg
Mansfield and (Dr.) Dave
Callender at Arden Hills. (MACE stood for "(Greg) Mansfield's Answer to
Customer Engineering".
Lots of great and interesting operating systems start as a reaction to the
status quo or some idea they find abhorrent. UNIX and many variants
certainly have. Ie.. Ken & Dennis working on side-projects while bored and
demotivated by Multics, BSD guys reacting to AT&T clamping down, Linus
reacting to his profs, Theo forking NetBSD, I could go on and on...
UNIX: Born in rebellion.
Most batch programs written for SCOPE would run fine
on MACE with few,
if any, modifications.
Did Control Data sell both or was one from an alternative vendor?
In retrospect, CDC keeping two operating systems
(SCOPE was part of CPD
in Sunnyvale, while KRONOS stayed home in Arden Hillls) was probably a
strategic blunder, since much duplicate effort was wasted. Eventually,
the two were merged into NOS (for Network Operating System).
I found this PDF:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/cdc/cyber/nos/60435400J_NO…
It's interesting to me because of how "different" everything is. I'm not
well versed in mainframe operating systems. It's interesting.
There aren't any alignment issues, since the CPU
was only
word-addressable. This was when a character was 6 bits (think IBM 709x,
UNIVAC 1100, etc.) So a word with 10 characters was logical.
I figured it was something like that, but I'm so used to 8-bit bytes and
such. It takes a minute to adjust my thinking to a different base, but
it's not that hard.
Given that PP words 12 bits (5 to a CM word) and there
were 10 PPUs,
each executing at a speed 1/10th the CPU, it had a very pleasant sort of
symmetry.
I suppose it doesn't matter as long as things factor out properly: no
worries.
COMPASS was indeed advanced for its time, but then so
was OS/360
assembly language. Given that assembly was the lingua franca of system
programming, assemblers had to be good. Most of the readability was due
to attention to detail by the programmer, not any particular language
feature.
Well, the sample code I could find was particularly well put together by
someone who knew they were doing. I'm a pretty poor ASM programmer, since
the only one I ever put much effort into was for the M68k (which is really
easy compared to some). I've got a big crush on MIPS ASM but I never was
any good with it. C ruined me. :-)
... Is
super-readable, in fact, probably a bit more than several
much-newer dialects on different platforms. There was one instruction
"PROTECT" I found pretty interesting, too.
Where did you find that?
I've never heard of such an instruction.