26 Oct
2017
26 Oct
'17
11:35 a.m.
From: Al Kossow
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 9:04 AM
On 10/25/17 11:55 AM, Rich Alderson via cctalk wrote:
> Noel, do have a reference for "some
commercial time-sharing system in the
> Boston area"? From Paul Allen's autobiography, the Harvard system was
> followed immediately by their move to Albuquerque, where they leased time on
> the local school board's PDP-10, and that's what my friends who worked for
> Micro-soft back then have told me, as well.
Harvard had an SDS 940, which shipped with a version
of Berkeley's
timesharing system. Tymshare's version of that system was significantly
improved, and included "Super BASIC". SDS's OS was replaced with
Tymshare's
at Harvard because the original was so bad, and so they were exposed to that
version of BASIC. PA told me that was the influence for M-S's BASIC
extensions.
Harvard also had a KA-10, which is what PGA's 8008 -> 8080 simulator ran on,
using the User UUO capabilities of the architecture and operating system:
Microprocessor 8-bit byte in the address field, and a user-defined operation in
the opcode field to do the interpretation/call the interpreter. (The simulator
was originally written for the Traf-O-Data device, which was 8008 based.) I
put the code on our Tops-10 system while he was writing the book, and the
version of BASIC we run on the Altair 8800 in the Exhibit Hall was compiled on
that system; it is not a Microsoft product.
I know about the influence of SuperBASIC; I did not know about the Harvard 940.
Thanks for the note!
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputers.org
http://www.LivingComputers.org/