Re: [TUHS] 386BSD released

[Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>]

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"SHARE.  It's not an acronym.  It's what we do."

*Still* a bad-ass slogan after all these years.

Adam

On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 7:22 PM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > Arguably ancient PDP-10 operating systems like ITS, WAITS, TENEX were
> > somewhat "open" and "free", but it's not a clear cut case.
>
> The open source movement was a revival of the old days of SHARE and other
> user groups.
>
> SAP, the SHARE assembly program for the IBM 704, was freely available--with
> source code--to all members of the SHARE user group. I am not aware of any
> restrictions on redistribution.
>
> Other more specialized programs were also freely available through SHARE.
> In
> particular, Fortran formatted IO was adopted directly from a SHARE program
> written by Roy Nutt (who also wrote SAP and helped write Fortran I).
>
> Bell Labs freely distributed the BESYS operating system for the IBM 704.
> At the time (1958) no operating system was available from IBM.
>
> IBM provided source code for the Fortran II compiler. In the
> fashion of the time, I spent a memorable all-night session with
> that code at hand, finding and fixing a bizarre bug (a computed GOTO
> bombed if the number of branches was 74 mod 75) with a bizarre cause
> (the code changed the index-register field in certain instructions on the
> fly--inconsistently). And there was no operating system to help, because
> BESYS swapped itself out to make room for the compiler.
>
> Doug
>

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