[COFF] [TUHS] History of m6?

[clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

Moving to a COFF

On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 4:16 AM Thomas Paulsen <thomas.paulsen at firemail.de>
wrote:

> 'T'was before my time, but the legend has it that the original BLISS-10 bootstrap
> compiler was a set of TECO macros that Chuck Geschke (Adobe's
> founder) wrote.'
> Really? TECO = Tape Editor and Corrector

TECO started as that for PDP-1 or maybe TX-1 (at MIT I believe).  But over
time, TECO became the primary text editor on the PDP-10's for many, many
people in the ARPA community.   I learned it as my second, PDP-10 text
editor (I learned a line editor, who's name I forget, that was similar to
the IBM's editor when I got my first PDP-10 account, but quickly moved to
TECO).   FWIW: The original EMACS was a set of TECO macros.  The historical
truth is that besides being the primary text editor, it was so rich in
function that TECO became for the PDP-10 what Jon Bentley describes as a
'little language' and was used for all sorts of small hacks.

The later Unix world created other tools, be it sed, later awk, and the
like.  But for the PDP-10 world, TECO very much that low level engine that
a lot of people used.

When BLISS was written, CMU did not have UNIX (and thus nor any of the UNIX
tools - as I had a small hand in making UNIX happen @ CMU in the early
1970s).  But when I arrived, the two PDP-10's (CMU-A and CMU-B) reigned
supreme as primary CS (and EE) systems, along with the CMU hacked version
of IBM's TSS running on the 360 for everyone else (and where I got my first
real programming job), plus CMU's own TSS/8 on couple of PDP-8s that were
scattered about.

FWIW: Chuck used the PDP-10's for his work as a grad student.  He also is
famous for being the first PhD to produce his thesis on a 'laser printer',
the CMU XGP (it was not a laser as today, it was modified FAX machine made
by Xerox).   The fun story is that CMU's administration would not accept
his thesis originally because the library wanted the 'originals' to put in
the archives.   It took 6-9 months for his thesis advisor (Bill Wulf) to
convince the library, that they had the originals.

Anyway, the use of TECO in such a manner was very much the way things were
done in those days, so the legend is very much possible.
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