[TUHS] origin of null-terminated strings

[Clem Cole]

Tom Lyon -- TSS was around and supported into the 80's.  That said, I've
seen that May '71, but it might be a typo -- '81 sounds much more plausible
as it real death.   IIRC Tom Haight has better dates in his book.

FWIW: I was at CMU in the mid 70s [programming TSS including installing
fixes from the IBM support team].  Plus, my old boss, Dean Hiller, left CMU
in the late 70s to work for IBM as a TSS system person [he retired from IBM
years later and had moved to the AIX team at one point].   And I also have
a copy of one of the TSS documents that has a printing date of 1980.

It's also possible IBM stopped *selling new sites* in the early 70s,  but
TSS was definitely a supported product throughout the 1980s.  IBM had some
large and important customers running TSS, in particular, NASA and I
believe a couple of automotive ones -- maybe GM and Rolls Royce but I don't
know.   IIRC: One of the original mechanical CAD programs had been
developed on it and users needed either MTS or TSS to run it properly.

I also remember that in 77-78, when CMU started to move off the /67 to the
DEC-20s, IBM had counter-proposed an S370/168 with VM on it - which CMU had
rejected.  But Amdahl had proposed CMU could keep running TSS on their
then-newest system which was at least the V7 (maybe the V8 as I have
forgotten when the latter was released).

Around that same time, Michigan had stayed with MTS but had switched to
Amdhal as the vendor.
ᐧ

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 1:15 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Clem doesn't mention CP-67/CMS, which IBM kept trying to kill in favor of
> CMS.
> From Melinda Varian's amazing history of VM, I gleaned these factoids:
> CP-67 - 8 sites by May '68
> Feb of 68 - IBM decommits from TSS
> Apr 69 - IBM rescinds decommit of TSS
> CP-67 - 44 sites by 1970, ~10 internal to IBM
> May 71 - TSS finally decommitted
>
> So TSS was a rocky road, while CP&VM were simple and just worked.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 9:13 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> Given the number of ex-MTS (Bill Joy and Ted Kowalski, to name two) and
>> TSS hackers that were also later to be UNIX hackers after their original
>> introduction to system programming as undergrads.  I will keep this reply
>> in TUHS, although it could be argued that it belongs in COFF.
>>
>> Note good sources for even more of the background of the history politics
>> at both IBM & GE can be found in Haigh and Ceruzzi's book: "A New
>> History of Modern Computing
>> <https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Modern-Computing/dp/0262542900>" -
>> which I have previously mentioned as it is a beautiful read.
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 5:27 PM Douglas McIlroy <
>> douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>> All true, but a few details are glossed over, and thus, this could be
>> misinterpreted - so I'm going to add those as one of the people.
>>
>> TSS and the /67 was IBM's answer to Multics, as Doug mentions.  Note that
>> the /67 could run as a model /65, which as I understand it, most of the
>> ones IBM sold did.
>>
>> At the time, IBM offered the /67 to Universities at a
>> substantial discount (I believe even less than the /65).  Thus, several
>> schools bought them with Michigan, CMU, Cornell, and Princeton that I am
>> aware of; but I suspect there were others.
>>
>> TSS was late, and the first releases could have been more stable.
>>  Cornell and Princeton chose to run their systems as /65 using the original
>> IBM OS.  CMU and Michigan both received copies of TSS with their systems.
>>  Michigan would do a substantial rewrite, which was different enough that
>> became the new system MTS.   CMU did a great deal of bug fixing, which went
>> back to IBM, and they chose to run TSS.  [I believe that CMU runs OS/360 by
>> data and TSS at night until they felt they could trust it to not crash].
>> Nominally, TSS and MTS should share programs, and with some work, both
>> could import source programs from OS/360 [My first paid programming job was
>> helping to rewrite York/APL from OS/360 to run on TSS].  So the compilers
>> and many tools for all three were common.
>>
>> MTS and TSS used the same file system structure, or it was close enough
>> that tools were shared.  I don't know if OS/360 could read TSS disk packs -
>> I would have suspected, although the common media of the day was 1/2" mag
>> tape.
>>
>> This leads to a UNIX legacy that ...  Ted's fsck(8) - which purists know
>> as a different name in the first version -  was modeled after the disk
>> scavenger program from TSS and MTS.   icheck/ncheck et al. seem pretty
>> primitive if you had used to see the other as a system programmer first.
>>  Also, a big reason why all the errors were originally in uppercase was the
>> IBM program had done it.  In many ways, neither Ted nor I knew any better
>> at the time.
>>
>> Clem
>>
>>
>>
>>
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