[TUHS] PWB vs Unix/TS

ron at ronnatalie.com ron at ronnatalie.com
Thu Sep 12 03:14:42 AEST 2019


And SCCS was way easier than anything you could do with cards.
My first experience with PWB was maintaining the source code and QA for a project that was targeted at RSX-11M.

Amusingly, it as my job twice at different facilities (BRL and Rutgers) to get rid of all the card processing equipment.

I finally offered to move the Cyber RJE station and its accompanying keypunch machine into the office of the last person using it.   He finally decided he'd make the jump to timesharing.
Amusingly, nobody figured out how to make CyberRJE work from a PDP-11.   The labs had purchased a half dozen PDP-11/34s with a optical card reader, line printer, and graphical display (Vector General) and a DQ-11 and 56K (them was fast in those days) short haul modem.

Of course, in Mike Muuss's typical style, he said we could use them.    They all got recycled into graphics workstations.   Mike wrote a driver for the Vector General and the first ersatz "BRL CAD" package.    We still used the card reader to read in old "COMGEO" graphic model decks which CAD could edit.

UNIX for the 11/34 (a hybrid V6 kernel), we installed overlays.    When TCP/IP came around which needed another segment register for mbufs, we just couldn't make it work anymore on a non-split-I/D machine.    The VGs got moved over to the 11/70's and I recycled the 34's into internet routers.    We actually used the DQ's and modems for internal communciations for a while until we subsequently bought IMPs and later Proteon rings.




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