Cryptolocker (was RE: Is tape dead?

On 09/16/2015 12:23 PM, Sean Caron wrote: Sad that they don't have any early software. In the beginning there was COS (Chippewa Operating System), followed by SCOPE (which doesn't really describe a specific OS, but more on that later). On the 6000, both were essentially PP-oriented, leaving the CP to do the real work. MACE was essentially a bootleg product mostly done a night on the Arden Hills QA floor by (Dr.) Dave Callender (he of the bats) and Greg Mansfield (whom I had the privilege of introducing to the delights of gelato--but that's another issue. Greg wanted a slimmed-down operating system for the CE community--hence, the name "Mansfield's Answer to Customer Engineering). Greg, unfortunately, was your basic geek, not good with people, but very talented. Without Dave's promotion, I doubt that it would have gotten anywhere. MACE did make its way into the academic community. I believe that Purdue added and extended it quite a bit. One aspect is that the OS was considerably more CP-involved than SCOPE. So, for the interactive stuff like PLATO, MACE was re-named KRONOS and launched as a separate official product. At the user level, the two were pretty much compatible, but internally, they were very different. For example, SCOPE had a rather elaborate disk driver, called 1SP (for "Stack Processor"), which sorted and prioritized disk requests based *partly* on the distance that a seek to cylinder involved. KRONOS on the other hand, used a much simpler "first-come, first-served" principle. Mostly, it was a battle of cultures. SCOPE was maintained out of Palo Alto (Porter Drive) and later, Sunnyvale (Moffet Park Drive) and KRONOS out of Arden Hills. Sometime around the advent of the Cyber 70 series, management made a non-decision (with 128 vice presidents, how could it be otherwise?) So, KRONOS was re-christened NOS (network operating system) and SCOPE became NOS/BE (batch environment). Eventually, enough of the BE aspect was rolled into NOS that only one--NOS survived. Besides, CDC was doing their best to get rid of as much staff as they could at CDC Sunnyvale. Certain key people, however, refused to transfer, so it took well into the 80s before the last light went out in Sunnyvale. Now, that's about Cyber 70/6000 NOS/SCOPE. The 7600 was a very different beast. For one, the 7000 PPs didn't run as slots in a barrel--they were fully independent. Secondly, the PPs were hard-assigned a buffer region each in SCM--they did not have unfettered access to memory. This meant that the PP-resident aspect of 6000 SCOPE (and KRONOS) was unworkable on the 7600. So, 7000 SCOPE was born--mostly, what I saw was SCOPE 2 and SCOPE 2.1. With the PPs dedicated to pretty much nothing but simple I/O, the whole business of job control and user interface fell to the CP. Note that the 7600 had very fast SCM, but not much of it, so storage of transient programs was left to slower LCM. The scheme adopted was to have various functions of the OS be nested, matryoshka-doll style with the user program in the inside. So outside of the user program, you could have the job supervisor, then the record manager, then the buffer manager and so on.. So 7600 SCOPE was nothing like 6000 SCOPE (or NOS). There were other 6000-series operating systems, not very well known to this day. For example, the ROVER people had their own version of what I assume was an early SCOPE--I'm not certain if this has been declassified even today, so the less said the better. There was TCM, Time-Critical Monitor which claimed to have a maxiumum average event latency of 100 nsec ZODIAC was built on the TCM OS, used lots of ECS in multi-mainframe configurations to host "chains" of real-time transactions (a bit complex to explain) that essentially operated with its own I/O and filesystem. Life was interesting back then... By the time you hit the 80s and the CYBER 180, not so much. --Chuck