On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 1:26 PM, William Pechter wrote: > DEC's later diagnostics were excellent. They were copied by a ton of folks > including Masscomp and Alliant who wrote frighteneningly similar > diagnostic supervisors. > ​Can't speak for Alliant but Masscomp and DEC had shared authorship in he diagnostics group. The former in C and later in BLISS of course; but the authors were pretty much the same. If it works, don't mess with it. Also the Tech's were all originally ex-DEC so it made sense - although the manufacturing guys were ex-DG.​ Actually there was a story I tell. Both Masscomp and DEC were using the same HW CAD system at one point. DEC has a microcode assembler that had originally been written in PDP-11 assembler and was running compatibility mode on the Vax. Masscomp wrote a new microcode assembler that was "frighteningly similar" in C that tjt the UNIX guys put together with lex/yacc and the like one weekend for the HW team. Knowledge of this made its way to the mill. It was also know that DEC has a number of CAD libraries that the HW guys had been using to make their board layouts easier -- discussions occurred over beers at the Mau Kaui... tapes some how fell out of cars one night... and DEC had a microcode assembler running on Ultrix in C and somehow our HW guys stopped complain about some missing libraries they wanted. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: