Re: [COFF] [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

Re: [COFF] [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[John Cowan]

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[-TUHS] [+COFF]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 4:06 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars@nocrew.org> wrote:

On ITS it only ever stored characters as full 36-bit words!  So sizeof
> char == 1 == sizeof int.  This is allowed per the C standard.  (Maybe it
> was updated somewhere else, I dunno.)
>

The ZETA-C compiler ran on the Symbolics Lisp Machine and translated C into
Zetalisp; since everything was a Lisp object, from the C perspective all
elementary types had sizeof == 1 also.  The modern Vacietis compiler to
Common Lisp uses the same design for its data, though it does not share any
code.  C pointers are represented by CL closures.

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Moved to the COFF list.

> Yes, WAITS is what I was thinking of. As I mentioned in my previous
> mail, it feels like the SAIL timesharing systems get mentioned briefly
> in a lot of accounts of historical computing, sometimes with mention
> that they had some sort of (relatively) advanced video terminals, but
> no in-depth descriptions of the actual hardware/software environment.

I agree WAITS gets very little attention, particularly in relation to
the great number of things pioneered at SAIL.

I'm involved making emulators for some of the hardware.  SAIL started
out with a couple PDP-1 timesharing systems with vector displays from
Philco.  But that's almost a pre historical era.

The PDP-6/10 started with another vector system from III.  It could
support up to 12 displays, but only ever had 6.  A raster display system
was added in the early 70s.  It must have been one of the very first
bitmapped display systems.  It came from the Data Disc company and used
disk for storage.  It was dual ported: the computer could write data,
and the displays could read.  64 displays were supported.

The III and DD displays used the SAIL keyboard which introduced the META
key.

The Data Disc displays and SAIL keyboard heavily influenced Tom Knight
at MIT to make a similar system for their AI lab PDP-10 running ITS.
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