What's the rarest or most unusual software item do you own?
Adrian Stoness
tdk.knight at gmail.com
Fri Jan 13 01:52:59 CST 2017
i have something called coss-4 never been able to find anything on it
https://www.flickr.com/photos/1ajs/6109885397/in/photolist-doJhoE-aiUL4F-5ruwb7
On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 1:47 AM, Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
> > What about software?
>
> I guess the PDP-11 operating system TRANTOR would be my most unusual
> piece.
>
> "Trantor was created by Steve Orszag of the MIT Applied Math
> department to access the CDC and Cray computers at NCAR for his fluid
> dynamics research. NCAR expected people to access the systems with
> an expensive piece of equipment that read punched cards, sent off the
> data over a synchronous modem using a proprietary protocol, and then
> sent output back to the printer. Not only was it expensive, who
> wanted to use punch cards? So Orszag bought a PDP-11 and hired
> undergrads to write software to use Emacs-like editing to create
> programs on the local harddrive, submit them using the proprietary
> protocol (which we sort of had to reverse engineer), and print and
> graph the results. ECC, CBF, and I were the early developers (there
> were a host of undergrad and grad student users as well, doing fluid
> dynamics). Somehow this was cheaper than the archaic method.
> Trantor was then a communications OS with built-in applications. We
> did the development on MIT-MC using the PDP-11 assembler and
> emulator."
>
> I recently found a copy and sent it to the original authors.
>
More information about the cctalk
mailing list