Help reading a 9 track tape

Bill Gunshannon bill.gunshannon at hotmail.com
Tue Aug 3 18:18:35 CDT 2021


On 8/3/21 4:51 PM, Dave Wade G4UGM via cctalk wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Dennis Boone
>> via cctalk
>> Sent: 03 August 2021 21:31
>> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
>> Subject: Re: Help reading a 9 track tape
>>
>>   > It was intended to be a stop-gap, to be discarded when the ICL was  >
>> replaced with PR1ME.  However the PR1ME was benchmarked with Fortran
>> 66.
>>   > When Pr1me Fortran 77 was delivered its performance was "pants" so the
>>> "stop gap" ICL compiler was ported to PR1ME...
>>
>> Wish we could find that Prime compiler.  I think there were one or two
>> others, as well.
> 
> Well you could ask Silverfrost who now own it. I think a lot of Salford
> Pr1me software was lost.
> I wish I could find the X.25 software we wrote...
> 

A lot of third-party software that ran on Pr1me has been lost.
EDv Editor was nice.  Written in Fortran.  A really good version
of APL.  The best and most complete version of The Software Tools
Virtual Operating System from GA Tech.  And others I can not recall
the names of at the moment.  When I was doing Pr1mes we had all of
it.  I even did a port of The UNaXcess BBS system as an interface
to USENET.

People have talked about porting other old OSes to modern hardware
if the sources hadn't been lost.  I would love to have a shot at
porting Primos to run on x86-64 or even ARM.

bill




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