2 Aug
2021
2 Aug
'21
9:19 a.m.
On Aug 2, 2021, at 11:11 AM, James Liu via cctech
<cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Thanks for feedback and offers to assist. I received the tape from
one of the maintainers of Schoonship at CERN, and it was probably made
around 1978 at SLAC.
For some background, Tini Veltman developed Schoonship in the 1960's
at CERN on the CDC 6600. My understanding is that he more or less
insisted on coding in assembly since he thought FORTRAN or other high
level languages would just get in the way and slow things down.
Depending on what he was trying to do that may well be a valid assessment. CDC Fortran
was known to be pretty good, but Fortran is not the obvious answer for implementing
interpreters or other language processors, which this sounds like.
...
Getting back to the tape, I'm pretty sure it has Strubbe's PL/I like
code as it is an archive of the PL/I conversion. It may also have CDC
source, but that is less obvious until we can see the contents. The
CDC source is historically the most relevant, and I am hoping it
exists on the tape.
Just to make sure you're aware of this: if it is CDC source code, you can run that on
the DtCyber emulator. That's a full 6000 / 170 series machine emulator which can run
almost all CDC 6000 series software and operating systems. Not a 180 (for NOS/VE) system,
nor an implementation of the 7600 architecture, but I assume you're not dealing with
peripheral processor code anyway. DtCyber is open source; a fork of it has been running
the PLATO system for over 10 years now. Copies of NOS are also openly available (by
permission of the owners, not bootleg copies).
paul