TOPS-20

At 04:00 PM 20-10-98 -0400, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote: No, but I spent eight years or so using TOPS-10. I did a fair amount of programming on it using various programming languages (Macro, FORTRAN, Pascal, Algol, Algol-68, Simula-67, Bliss-10, BCPL, Focal, etc. etc.) although I spent most time in the Bliss, BCPL and Macro area. I guess by the end of it all I'd consider myself a sophisticated non-privileged systems programmer (I wasn't on the Computer Centre staff) but did help with special monitor builds from time to time. I think there's a large bit of nostalgia in my love of TOPS-10 and related things. I'm not sure I'd want to go back to spending my days in front of a VT05 at 2400 baud. It's nice to have multiple windows, graphics, music etc! I do miss the programming languages though. You just can't seem to get the same mix for Digital Unix (at least not free anyway....). One of the things that made life so much easier as a programmer was a package called IOLIB which was written by one of the systems staff here at La Trobe (a guy named Rob Cook). It added a run-time library and a large number of macros to make assembly language programming easier. In many ways it covered up the difficulty of not having a "standard" I/O library, something that was addressed with TOPS-10 and the JSYS UUO. I'm not clear on this, can someone confirm that JSYS was a UUO - I remember reading about this in the mid-70s and as it was a -20ism, never got to play with it! Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies(a)latrobe.edu.au Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479 1999 La Trobe University | "If God had wanted soccer played in the Melbourne Australia 3083 | air, the sky would be painted green"