From: clemc at ccc.com (Clement T. Cole)
Subject: [COFF] Other OSes?
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 10:46:44 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <0D6EEA19-AD29-4B6F-967E-A015C5D4D081@ccc.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20180709143937.GC29373@thunk.org>
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Your right it’s was called a 19” technology and physical platter was closer to 17 or 18 - we should ask Dan to measure it
Sent from my iPad
> On Jul 9, 2018, at 10:39 AM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 08:52:00AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>>
>> rIght and the RIM loaded was printed on front panel of the console. btw
>> the disk was 19” in diamete. Danny Klein has the original disk platter
>> from the one of the original PDP-8 - before marriage it used to hang in his
>> living room. FYI that was the system at the computer museum from the EE
>> Dept after it died in approx ‘75 I was there the disk crashed.
>
> I don't think it was 19" --- the DF32 was mounted in a 19" rack, yes.
> But the platter was in an enclosure which was distinctly smaller than
> the overall width of the DF32, and the platter was smaller still. See
> the pictures here[1] and here[2].
>
> [1] https://www.pdp8.net/dfds32/dfds32.shtml
> [2] https://www.pdp8.net/dfds32/pics/df32diskorig.shtml?small
>
> I once physically held the DF32 platter in my hands. My dad and I
> pulled it out of the enclosure, wiped it down with alcohol, looked at
> both sides of the platter to see which was less scratched up, and put
> the "better" side face down on top of the fixed heads, and then
> screwed the platter back into place. And it worked, afterwards, too!
> You can't do that with today's HDD's! :-)
>
>>> Later PDP-8's would run more a sophisticated OS, such as OS/8, which
>>> had a "Concise Command Language" (CCL) that was designed to be similar
>>> to the TOPS-10 system running on the PDP-10. OS/8 was a single-user
>>> system, though; no time-sharing!
>>
>> Be careful grasshopper. TSS/8 is available on those web sites although I
>> admit it does not run on my PiDP-8 and I have not figured why (Something is
>> corrupt and I have not spent the time or energy to chase it). Anyway,
>> TSS/8. Supported 4-8 ASR-33 terminals, each had 4K words as you described
>> before. There was assembler, basic, focal, Fortran-IV and an Algol circa
>> 1965 extensions.
>
> I had forgotten about TSS/8. OS/8 was indeed only single-user,
> although apparently there was a multi-user BASIC interpreter which was
> available as an option. Our PDP-8/i only had 8k of core memory so
> while in theory it was possible (barely) to run OS/8, we never did.
> My knowledge of OS/8 was only from the manuals. (And indeed, how I
> first learned binary arithmatic, and programming in general, was via
> thet Digital's "Introduction to Programming" book[1] which I inhaled
> when I was maybe seven or eight.)
>
> [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20051220132023/http://www.bitsavers.org:80/pdf/dec/pdp8/IntroToProgramming1969.pdf
>
> TSS/8 was so far beyond the capabilities of the PDP-8 in my father's
> lab that I never spent much time learning about it. I think some of
> the DECUS books we had referenced it, so I knew of its existence, but
> not much more than that.
>
>> RIght this is really the model for RT11 which would begat CP/M and last
>> DOS-86 (aka PC-DOS, later renamed MS-DOS).
>
> We had a PDP-11 at my computer lab in high school. It was actually
> running TSX-11 (the time-sharing extension of RT-11), so it could
> support a dozen or so virtual instances of RT-11, where we learned
> PDP-11 assembler in the advanced comp-sci class.
>
> I remember two fun things about the TSX-11; the first was that when
> you logged out of TSX-11, it would print the time used on the console,
> and that was being printed by the underlying RT-11 --- so if you typed
> control-S right at that point, it would lock up the whole system, and
> all of the other users would be dead in the water.
>
> The other fun thing was if you could get physical access to the
> PDP-11, and brought the secondary disk off-line, and then forced a
> reboot, RT-11 wouldn't be able to bring the TSX-11 system up fully,
> and so the LA36 console would drop to a RT-11 command line prompt
> without asking for a password. This would allow you to run the
> account editing program to set up a new privileged TSX-11 account.
> (Basically, the equivalent of editing /etc/passwd and adding another
> account with uid == 0.)
>
> My knowledge of these facts was, of course, purely hypothetical. :-)
>
> In any case, that was why the first Linux FTP site in North America
> was named "tsx-11.mit.edu"; it was a Vax VS3800 running Ultrix that
> was sitting in my office when I was working at MIT as a full-time
> staff member. At first, tsx-11 was my personal workstation, but over
> time it became a dedicated full-time server and migrated to larger and
> more powerful machines; first a Dec Alpha running OSF/1, and later on,
> a more powerful Intel server running Linux. Shortly afterwards, I
> started working at VA Linux Systems, and while tsx-11 was operating
> for a while after that, after a while we shut it down since the
> hardware was getting old and I no longer had access to the machine
> room in MIT Building E40 where it lived.
>
> - Ted
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-07-09 14:46 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 61+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-07-05 5:56 wkt
2018-07-05 6:29 ` spedraja
2018-07-05 6:40 ` bakul
2018-07-05 15:23 ` clemc
2018-07-05 20:49 ` scj
2018-07-05 21:25 ` david
2018-07-06 15:42 ` gtaylor
2018-07-05 22:38 ` ralph
2018-07-05 23:11 ` bakul
2018-07-06 0:06 ` lm
2018-07-06 15:49 ` gtaylor
2018-07-06 0:52 ` tytso
2018-07-06 5:59 ` ralph
2018-07-06 15:59 ` gtaylor
2018-07-06 16:10 ` ralph
2018-07-06 16:47 ` gtaylor
2018-07-06 15:57 ` gtaylor
2018-07-06 15:38 ` gtaylor
2018-07-09 1:56 ` tytso
2018-07-09 3:25 ` gtaylor
2018-07-09 3:35 ` crossd
2018-07-09 3:43 ` gtaylor
2018-07-09 3:52 ` imp
2018-07-09 11:32 ` perry
2018-07-09 11:50 ` perry
2018-07-09 11:34 ` crossd
2018-07-09 5:23 ` tytso
2018-07-09 12:52 ` clemc
2018-07-09 13:06 ` [COFF] PiDP Obsolesces Guaranteed clemc
2018-07-09 14:39 ` [COFF] Other OSes? tytso
2018-07-09 14:46 ` clemc [this message]
2018-07-09 11:24 ` perry
2018-07-05 22:51 ` ewayte
2018-07-08 20:31 ` perry
2018-07-08 20:53 ` perry
2018-07-09 2:44 ` crossd
2018-07-10 5:30 ` bakul
2018-07-16 14:49 ` crossd
2018-07-16 16:59 ` [COFF] Capabilities (was " bakul
2018-07-06 0:55 ` [COFF] " crossd
2018-07-06 5:42 ` bakul
2018-07-09 2:51 ` crossd
2018-07-10 5:41 ` bakul
2018-07-06 4:04 ` grog
2018-07-06 16:10 ` gtaylor
2018-07-06 18:27 ` [COFF] Editor Scripts scj
2018-07-06 19:04 ` gtaylor
2018-07-08 20:50 ` [COFF] Other OSes? perry
2018-07-08 23:27 ` bakul
2018-07-09 0:00 ` grog
2018-07-09 0:13 ` perry
2018-07-09 0:05 ` crossd
2018-07-09 0:56 ` lm
2018-07-09 2:23 ` crossd
2018-07-09 0:11 ` perry
2018-07-09 0:19 ` crossd
2018-07-09 2:00 ` bakul
2018-07-09 3:02 ` [COFF] Origination of awful security design [COFF, COFF] bill
2018-07-09 13:10 ` [COFF] Other OSes? david
2018-07-09 13:17 ` perry
2018-07-09 13:13 ` perry
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