[COFF] Other OSes?

[Clement T. Cole]

Your right it’s was called a 19” technology and physical platter was closer to 17 or 18 - we should ask Dan to measure it

Sent from my iPad

> On Jul 9, 2018, at 10:39 AM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Jul 09, 2018 at 08:52:00AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>> 
>> rIght and the RIM loaded was printed on front panel of the console.  btw
>> the disk was 19” in diamete.  Danny Klein has the original disk platter
>> from the one of the original PDP-8 - before marriage it used to hang in his
>> living room. FYI that was the system at the computer museum from the EE
>> Dept after it died in approx ‘75  I was there the disk crashed.
> 
> I don't think it was 19" --- the DF32 was mounted in a 19" rack, yes.
> But the platter was in an enclosure which was distinctly smaller than
> the overall width of the DF32, and the platter was smaller still.  See
> the pictures here[1] and here[2].
> 
> [1] https://www.pdp8.net/dfds32/dfds32.shtml 
> [2] https://www.pdp8.net/dfds32/pics/df32diskorig.shtml?small
> 
> I once physically held the DF32 platter in my hands.  My dad and I
> pulled it out of the enclosure, wiped it down with alcohol, looked at
> both sides of the platter to see which was less scratched up, and put
> the "better" side face down on top of the fixed heads, and then
> screwed the platter back into place.  And it worked, afterwards, too!
> You can't do that with today's HDD's!  :-)
> 
>>> Later PDP-8's would run more a sophisticated OS, such as OS/8, which
>>> had a "Concise Command Language" (CCL) that was designed to be similar
>>> to the TOPS-10 system running on the PDP-10.  OS/8 was a single-user
>>> system, though; no time-sharing!
>> 
>> Be careful grasshopper.   TSS/8 is available on those web sites although I
>> admit it does not run on my PiDP-8 and I have not figured why (Something is
>> corrupt and I have not spent the time or energy to chase it).  Anyway,
>> TSS/8. Supported 4-8 ASR-33 terminals, each had 4K words as you described
>> before.  There was assembler, basic, focal, Fortran-IV and an Algol circa
>> 1965 extensions.
> 
> I had forgotten about TSS/8.  OS/8 was indeed only single-user,
> although apparently there was a multi-user BASIC interpreter which was
> available as an option.  Our PDP-8/i only had 8k of core memory so
> while in theory it was possible (barely) to run OS/8, we never did.
> My knowledge of OS/8 was only from the manuals.  (And indeed, how I
> first learned binary arithmatic, and programming in general, was via
> thet Digital's "Introduction to Programming" book[1] which I inhaled
> when I was maybe seven or eight.)
> 
> [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20051220132023/http://www.bitsavers.org:80/pdf/dec/pdp8/IntroToProgramming1969.pdf
> 
> TSS/8 was so far beyond the capabilities of the PDP-8 in my father's
> lab that I never spent much time learning about it.  I think some of
> the DECUS books we had referenced it, so I knew of its existence, but
> not much more than that.
> 
>> RIght this is really the model for RT11 which would begat CP/M and last
>> DOS-86 (aka PC-DOS, later renamed MS-DOS).
> 
> We had a PDP-11 at my computer lab in high school.  It was actually
> running TSX-11 (the time-sharing extension of RT-11), so it could
> support a dozen or so virtual instances of RT-11, where we learned
> PDP-11 assembler in the advanced comp-sci class.
> 
> I remember two fun things about the TSX-11; the first was that when
> you logged out of TSX-11, it would print the time used on the console,
> and that was being printed by the underlying RT-11 --- so if you typed
> control-S right at that point, it would lock up the whole system, and
> all of the other users would be dead in the water.
> 
> The other fun thing was if you could get physical access to the
> PDP-11, and brought the secondary disk off-line, and then forced a
> reboot, RT-11 wouldn't be able to bring the TSX-11 system up fully,
> and so the LA36 console would drop to a RT-11 command line prompt
> without asking for a password.  This would allow you to run the
> account editing program to set up a new privileged TSX-11 account.
> (Basically, the equivalent of editing /etc/passwd and adding another
> account with uid == 0.)
> 
> My knowledge of these facts was, of course, purely hypothetical.  :-)
> 
> In any case, that was why the first Linux FTP site in North America
> was named "tsx-11.mit.edu"; it was a Vax VS3800 running Ultrix that
> was sitting in my office when I was working at MIT as a full-time
> staff member.  At first, tsx-11 was my personal workstation, but over
> time it became a dedicated full-time server and migrated to larger and
> more powerful machines; first a Dec Alpha running OSF/1, and later on,
> a more powerful Intel server running Linux.  Shortly afterwards, I
> started working at VA Linux Systems, and while tsx-11 was operating
> for a while after that, after a while we shut it down since the
> hardware was getting old and I no longer had access to the machine
> room in MIT Building E40 where it lived.
> 
>                                          - Ted