[TUHS] origin of null-terminated strings

James Frew frew at ucsb.edu
Sat Dec 17 12:03:15 AEST 2022


Yes, MTS (Michigan Terminal System)!

One of my first jobs as a geography grad student was helping Waldo 
Tobler <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_R._Tobler> port a bunch of 
his MTS Fortran* programs to UCSB's 370/168 running OS/MVT. Definitely a 
step backwards, as Waldo never ceased to remind me.

He calmed down once he got a Tektronix storage tube display connected to 
our PDP-11/45 running v6; seemed like UNIX was almost as nice as MTS...

/Frew

*commented in German...

On 2022-12-16 14:26, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
>> was any thought given to trying to get a 360 system?
> Very serious thought. However, virtual memory was a non-negotiable
> desideratum, to which Gene Amdahl was implacably opposed because
> demand paging would devastate hardware performance. Soon after GE got
> the nod, IBM revealed Gerrit Blaauw's skunk-works project, the 360/67,
> but by then the die had been cast. Michigan bought one and built a
> nice time-sharing system that was running well before Multics.
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