Re: [COFF] Other OSes?

On Jul 9, 2018, at 10:39 AM, Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: 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! :-) 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/… 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. 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