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.
>


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