[TUHS] Re: origin of null-terminated strings

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5465 bytes --]

typo... sigh...

TSS was definitely a supported product throughout *the 1970s and into* the
1980s
ᐧ

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 1:43 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Tom Lyon -- TSS was around and supported into the 80's.  That said, I've
> seen that May '71, but it might be a typo -- '81 sounds much more plausible
> as it real death.   IIRC Tom Haight has better dates in his book.
>
> FWIW: I was at CMU in the mid 70s [programming TSS including installing
> fixes from the IBM support team].  Plus, my old boss, Dean Hiller, left CMU
> in the late 70s to work for IBM as a TSS system person [he retired from IBM
> years later and had moved to the AIX team at one point].   And I also have
> a copy of one of the TSS documents that has a printing date of 1980.
>
> It's also possible IBM stopped *selling new sites* in the early 70s,  but
> TSS was definitely a supported product throughout the 1980s.  IBM had some
> large and important customers running TSS, in particular, NASA and I
> believe a couple of automotive ones -- maybe GM and Rolls Royce but I don't
> know.   IIRC: One of the original mechanical CAD programs had been
> developed on it and users needed either MTS or TSS to run it properly.
>
> I also remember that in 77-78, when CMU started to move off the /67 to the
> DEC-20s, IBM had counter-proposed an S370/168 with VM on it - which CMU had
> rejected.  But Amdahl had proposed CMU could keep running TSS on their
> then-newest system which was at least the V7 (maybe the V8 as I have
> forgotten when the latter was released).
>
> Around that same time, Michigan had stayed with MTS but had switched to
> Amdhal as the vendor.
> ᐧ
>
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 1:15 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Clem doesn't mention CP-67/CMS, which IBM kept trying to kill in favor of
>> CMS.
>> From Melinda Varian's amazing history of VM, I gleaned these factoids:
>> CP-67 - 8 sites by May '68
>> Feb of 68 - IBM decommits from TSS
>> Apr 69 - IBM rescinds decommit of TSS
>> CP-67 - 44 sites by 1970, ~10 internal to IBM
>> May 71 - TSS finally decommitted
>>
>> So TSS was a rocky road, while CP&VM were simple and just worked.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 9:13 AM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Given the number of ex-MTS (Bill Joy and Ted Kowalski, to name two) and
>>> TSS hackers that were also later to be UNIX hackers after their original
>>> introduction to system programming as undergrads.  I will keep this reply
>>> in TUHS, although it could be argued that it belongs in COFF.
>>>
>>> Note good sources for even more of the background of the history
>>> politics at both IBM & GE can be found in Haigh and Ceruzzi's book: "A
>>> New History of Modern Computing
>>> <https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Modern-Computing/dp/0262542900>" -
>>> which I have previously mentioned as it is a beautiful read.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 5:27 PM Douglas McIlroy <
>>> douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> IBM revealed Gerrit Blaauw's skunk-works project, the 360/67,
>>>> but by then the die had been cast. Michigan bought one and built a
>>>> nice time-sharing system that was running well before Multics.
>>>>
>>> All true, but a few details are glossed over, and thus, this could be
>>> misinterpreted - so I'm going to add those as one of the people.
>>>
>>> TSS and the /67 was IBM's answer to Multics, as Doug mentions.  Note
>>> that the /67 could run as a model /65, which as I understand it, most
>>> of the ones IBM sold did.
>>>
>>> At the time, IBM offered the /67 to Universities at a
>>> substantial discount (I believe even less than the /65).  Thus, several
>>> schools bought them with Michigan, CMU, Cornell, and Princeton that I am
>>> aware of; but I suspect there were others.
>>>
>>> TSS was late, and the first releases could have been more stable.
>>>  Cornell and Princeton chose to run their systems as /65 using the original
>>> IBM OS.  CMU and Michigan both received copies of TSS with their systems.
>>>  Michigan would do a substantial rewrite, which was different enough that
>>> became the new system MTS.   CMU did a great deal of bug fixing, which went
>>> back to IBM, and they chose to run TSS.  [I believe that CMU runs OS/360 by
>>> data and TSS at night until they felt they could trust it to not crash].
>>> Nominally, TSS and MTS should share programs, and with some work, both
>>> could import source programs from OS/360 [My first paid programming job was
>>> helping to rewrite York/APL from OS/360 to run on TSS].  So the compilers
>>> and many tools for all three were common.
>>>
>>> MTS and TSS used the same file system structure, or it was close enough
>>> that tools were shared.  I don't know if OS/360 could read TSS disk packs -
>>> I would have suspected, although the common media of the day was 1/2" mag
>>> tape.
>>>
>>> This leads to a UNIX legacy that ...  Ted's fsck(8) - which purists know
>>> as a different name in the first version -  was modeled after the disk
>>> scavenger program from TSS and MTS.   icheck/ncheck et al. seem pretty
>>> primitive if you had used to see the other as a system programmer first.
>>>  Also, a big reason why all the errors were originally in uppercase was the
>>> IBM program had done it.  In many ways, neither Ted nor I knew any better
>>> at the time.
>>>
>>> Clem
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 9979 bytes --]