From: "Ron Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com>
To: "TUHS main list" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] BASIC, RSTS, and UNIX
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 16:02:03 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <em0d7c4379-fe76-43d6-80f5-1f5296bc74f0@alien> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2Phn_VahO7A2MCEHgMRV7isVo9W3s6wqdvw6Q=0koE9jg@mail.gmail.com>
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My BASIC experience came from the HP/2000 (and the HP/3000) systems the
Prince George's County (MD) schools had at the time. When I moved on
to Johns Hopkins, I was sent a letter in advance of my freshman year
from professor Bill Huggins who taught one of the freshman EE classes.
The class was to use Basic Plus on a PDP-11/45s using the UNIX
operating system. Now at this point, I had a friend whose mother
worked in the local DEC (Lanham, MD) office and would let us raid the
stock room for things like processor handbooks and the like. I was
able to find out about Basic Plus and PDP-11/45 but I was unable to find
anything about this UNIX thing.
Of course, once I got there I found that the EE computer center was
largely run by students under the name of the Undergraduate Computer
Society. Mike Muuss was in charge and they had made a deal that if
they could get BasicPlus migrated over from RSTS, they could run UNIX on
the machine. It turned out not to be that difficult. RSTS, like
most DEC OSes, for some reason used EMT for the system calls (contrary
to what the processor handbook would recommend). UNIX used TRAP.
This means all they had to do is emulate a few RSTS calls. In
addition, the only change I believe was to add a system call that
disabled the UNIX idea of stack management (Basic Plus like many DEC
programs of the day used a relatively small stack in low memory because
the actual register saves, etc... were stored elsewhere, it was just
function call linkage). The system call was obviously called
"nostack."
This hadn't been Mike's only foray into Basic. He had his own IBM
1130 and had written a Basic interpretter under contract for the
Baltimore County Public Schools. I remember sitting in the "KSR room"
at Hopkins and watching him preparing the invoice for payment.
Please remit $3000, no stamps please. That last part caused a bit of
consternation at the school district.
Amusingly, I have my little Raspberry Pi scale model 11/70 front panel
churning away on my desk. I can switch it from booting up various
UNIXes (mostly I run 2.9 BSD hacked to somewhat look like JHU UNIX) and
RSTS which reinforces why we used to refer to it as the Really Sh-tty
Timesharing System.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-11-16 16:11 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-11-16 3:16 [TUHS] Book Recommendation Douglas McIlroy
2021-11-16 4:08 ` G. Branden Robinson
2021-11-16 14:56 ` Clem Cole
2021-11-16 15:37 ` Richard Salz
2021-11-16 15:50 ` Adam Thornton
2021-11-16 16:02 ` Ron Natalie [this message]
[not found] ` <CAC20D2OT6ZcFOqnNCkqDUfAKy87wYu7mp7xx0ozzAT0eN1wr8g@mail.gmail.com>
2021-11-16 16:43 ` [TUHS] Speaking of groups: JHU Ownership Ron Natalie
2021-11-16 17:02 ` [TUHS] Book Recommendation Will Senn
2021-11-16 21:38 ` John Cowan
2021-11-16 21:46 ` Will Senn
2021-11-16 18:27 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-16 18:44 ` Heinz Lycklama
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