Thoth

Al Kossow wrote: Short answer: I'm afraid, to the best of my knowledge, it's another bunch of software victimized by entropy. Longer answer: I used to work on it at UBC, where Cheriton passed through for a couple of years before heading for Stanford. At UBC we had a TI-990 machine running Verex OS with Zed compiler there. The system continued to be used for a little while after Cheriton left, then fell into disuse as it was no longer seeing active development and people migrated to other systems. (My last project on the system was retargetting the Z compiler for the 68000.) (For others taking an interest, the Thoth-->Verex OS and Zed language support were developed with a focus on portability. The guiding principle in the OS was that processes and inter-process communication were cheap (in contrast to UNIX). The system supported multiple processes in the same address space and the blocking send-receive-reply IPC ensured certain issues regarding resource limits and reduced the complexity of code and data structures needed. It made for some interesting and elegant program structure/design.) One day circa 1983/4 the system wouldn't boot and nobody could quite muster the knowledge or enthusiasm to work around the problem and do a raw boot (I still remember the system password ..talk about useless information.). I wanted to make an effort to do so, and wanted to get copies of a lot of stuff over to another system, but had other tasks to focus on. (To my knowledge, Dave had taken a copy to Stanford (where it developed into the VKernel written in C, as I'm sure you are aware).) The 990 hardware went to a reseller I think and the software and manuals were tossed. I have a few spatterings of Z program listings still and a couple of technical reports about Verex/Zed, but that's it. I wish I had the Zed reference manual as it would be nice to be able to compare the language definition at least. It's (vaguely) conceivable there's still a copy of the Zed ref manual in the department library, as it was published as a UBC technical report, I'll look/ask if I'm out there sometime. Say hi to Dave if you see him again, it was a fun system to work and learn on.