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From: athornton at gmail.com (Adam Thornton)
Subject: [COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2020 20:22:01 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP2nic2Fj-BT+dB-YjM0AeXJYxoF3iL6rHzDPGWhkahBTdXgNQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20201111031126.GE99027@eureka.lemis.com>

Pretty sure SUPERZAP was for object files.  That was for wizardry beyond my
ken.  Normal VM service, as I recall, and I am only about 75% sure I'm
right, was in the form of source patches rather like diff files--I don't
know anymore if they were literally editor commands to transform File A
into File B, but that was the net effect--plus reassembly.  Patching the
object modules was possible, but you had to be better at it than I ever was
to pull it off.

Adam

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 8:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday, 11 November 2020 at 12:01:40 +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > On Wed, 11 Nov 2020, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> >
> >> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the
> >> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for a
> >> big computer was from source.  Now I've been asked for a reference, and
> >> I can't find one!  Can anybody help?
> >
> > Depends what you mean by "olden days" and "big computer".
>
> Since clarified, of course, but you're in the right track.
>
> > As I recall we (Uni of NSW) had the source to the 360/50 and the
> > Cyber 72, but not for the VMS stuff; binaries were patched with
> > IEBUPDTE and later on SUPERZAP (possibly written locally).
>
> Was SUPERZAP source or object related?  I thought the latter, but I've
> never come close to it.
>
> Greg
> --
> Sent from my desktop computer.
> Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
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  reply	other threads:[~2020-11-11  3:22 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-11-10 23:11 grog
2020-11-10 23:38 ` imp
2020-11-10 23:45 ` clemc
2020-11-11  0:06   ` grog
2020-11-11  0:10     ` athornton
2020-11-11  0:12       ` athornton
2020-11-11  3:09         ` grog
2020-11-11  4:54           ` dave
2020-11-11  4:58             ` grog
2020-11-13  2:15               ` dave
2020-11-13  6:57                 ` athornton
2020-11-11  2:07     ` clemc
2020-11-11  0:01 ` bakul
2020-11-11  1:26   ` dave
     [not found] ` <CAP2nic0LCUEGmMJ6_3OJQw8UPZgozjJGoetHJabL-w0DFL6neg@mail.gmail.com>
2020-11-11  0:02   ` grog
2020-11-11  1:01 ` dave
2020-11-11  2:03   ` brad
2020-11-11  3:11   ` grog
2020-11-11  3:22     ` athornton [this message]
2020-11-11  5:15     ` dave

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