[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Peter Yardley <peter.martin.yardley@gmail.com>]

Just a recollection …

Our department sold our Nova to the Navy (RAN) as part of a programming course on Novas and microcomputers. The Navy still used the Novas as gunnery computers, possibly amongst things, ours was going to be used for training. It had core memory, which was an advantage in the turrets of the frigates (hard drives of the time didn’t survive the shock). One of my colleagues used to fix the core memory using a magnifying loupe and a fine soldering iron.

We had Algol, ForTran and 8080 and 6502 cross assemblers amongst other things. There was a 16 user editor and you had to line up on the system console to be able to do a compilation (we were running a foreground/background OS, it was a pretty small system). We all used the same directory and had to name our files with our initials.
 
> On 8 Jul 2024, at 8:00 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 5 Jul 2024, Peter Yardley wrote:
> 
>> The DG Nova had a pretty nice architecture. 2 accumulators, 2 index 
>> registers, program counter, status register. No stack register tho. 
>> There was a micro processor version by Fairchild.
> 
> The story behind it is interesting too.  The designer at DEC (Ed de 
> Castro) tried to promote it, Ken Olson didn't like it, so he left to form 
> Data General and created the DG Nova.
> 
> OK, not a Unix box...
> 
> -- Dave

.1.3.6.1.4.1.8852.4.2
Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley@gmail.com