[COFF] [was TUHS] Pr1me and GT-SWT

[clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

At the risk of this drifting, it probably should move over to the COFF
mailing list, which I have CC'ed.   I'll do this one last one here so
people not yet on COFF that want to follow up can see it.

On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 2:27 AM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:

> It was bizarre and ugly.  The only thing that made it anywhere
> near usable were the Software Tools.
>
Amen...  (more in a minute)

>
> There's a reason Prime died pretty quickly once Unix started to
> spread.  The architecture also was strange; the characters used
> mark parity (8th bit always on).
>
Yeah, it was an interesting box.  Fast and cost-effective for its time and
an excellent Fortran system which why they did as well as they did.

>
> My 2 cents.
>
> Arnold
>
You probably know this but you folks had a huge influence on the Pr1mates.
 So much so when Bill P, Paul L, and Michael S. left Pr1me to create
Apollo, the used your version of the SWT as their first command system for
Aegis (*a.k.a.* DOMAIN OS).   They did not quite get it that they needed a
real UNIX, so they roped tjt and myself from Masscomp went we all formed
Belmont (*a.k.a.* Stellar in a later renaming).  But they did recognize it
was useful and people wanted to use that style of interface, not something
dreamed up specific to that machine.

I remember trying to explain to Bill the difference - he's a vision guy,
but primarily a hardware type, although one of the most amazing people I
have ever known.  IMO: Leach never really understood the Unix ideas of
being simple (which is one of the reasons why Windows has that
forsaken registry sin from Aegis, he brought it with him from Apollo to
MSFT).   I used to argue with him about it in the 1980s (he hated/thought
ASCII text files were terrible and he should control everything in some
framework or privileged API).
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