[TUHS] CTSS user interface?=

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

I got this a couple of days ago and thought I had sent it on, but
apparently not.  Here goes.

Greg

On Saturday, 26 December 2015 at 11:12:59 -0500, Tom Van Vleck wrote:
> Short answer to your question is "depends on what you mean by shell."
> Answer for Unix heads is http://multicians.org/shell.html where Louis Pouzin says he made up the name
> for Multics.  We never called the CTSS command processor a shell.
>
> When I used CTSS in 1963, command processing was in (wired) code in A-core.
> A simple program tokenized input lines, looked up the token in A-core tables, and either ran an
> A-core routine or loaded a command file, passing the rest of the arguments as a string array.
> To add a command, you had to recompile CTSS.  Look at the module COMC in the source.
>
> This command language is documented in the "candy stripe" CTSS manual.
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ctss/CTSS_ProgrammersGuide.pdf
>
> About 1964 or 65, COMC was changed to not list the disk loaded commands; if the table
> lookup failed, COMC looked for a disk file in a system directory, and ran it if it was found.
> System maintainers could add a command by copying a file into the directory.
> Command files were in core image format, already loaded and linked.  Conventional practice
> was to make them small and to expand the core image for things like I/O buffers at execution start.
>
> Some disk-loaded commands were listed in COMC and flagged as "privileged" so that they could
> call special supervisor entries to get the supervisor to do things forbidden to regular programs.
> the LOGIN command was an example: it could read the password file, forbidden to regular users,
> and could patch the A-core table of logged in users.
>
> Louis wrote a disk loaded program called RUNCOM that read command lines from a file, substituted
> arguments into the command, and requested the supervisor to run them, and then return control
> to RUNCOM.  This is a shell-like function.
>
> Noel Morris and I wrote an author-maintained unprivileged B-core CTSS program in 1965 called
> . SAVED that was also shell-like.  It read lines from the terminal, tokenized them, expanded
> abbreviations and iterations, and ran sequences of commands, and then resumed itself.  It had other
> features such as inter-user text messages. It allowed power CTSS users to extend the
> system-provided command set with their own set of SAVED files, all treated uniformly.
>
> Noel and I also added a facility to CTSS that allowed the system to run batch jobs.  The user
> submitted a RUNCOM file to a queue for later processing, much like Unix CRON.
>
> Revised command processing, RUNCOM, and . SAVED are documented in the second edition CTSS manual.
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/ctss/CTSS_ProgrammersGuide_Dec69.pdf
>
> Multics had a program known as the shell, which went through a long series of evolutions.
> Users could replace their command shell. A program called the listener read command lines
> and fed them to the shell, which tokenized the command lines and found and called individual commands.
> The argument-substituting run-from-a-file mode of operation of RUNCOM was done by the exec_com command.
> All of these Multics features and design were familiar to Ken and Dennis when they worked on Multics.
>
> You say you have been looking at the CTSS source.  You know you can run a simulated
> 7094 running a simulated CTSS, right?  http://www.cozx.com/~dpitts/ibm7090.html
>
> regards, tom

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