So I've been doing a bit of reading on 1A and 4ESS technologies lately, getting
a feel for the state of things just prior to 3B and 5ESS popping onto the scene,
and came across some BSTJ references to the programming environments involved
in the 4ESS and TSPS No. 1 systems.
The general assembly system targeting the 1A machine language was known as
SPC-SWAP (SWitching Assembly Program)[1](p. 206) and ran under OS/360/370, with
editing typically performed in QED. This then gave way to the EPL (ESS
Programming Language) and ultimately EPLX (EPL eXtra)[2](p. 1)[3](p. 8)
languages which, among other things, were used for later 4ESS work with cross-
compilers for at least TSS/360 by the sounds of it.
Are there any recollections of attempts by the Bell System to rebase any of
these 1A-targeting environments into UNIX, or by the time UNIX was being
considered more broadly for Bell System projects, was 3B/5ESS technology well on
the way, rendering attempting to move entrenched IBM-based environments for the
older switching computation systems moot?
For the record, in addition to the evolution of ESS to the 5ESS generation, a
revision of TSPS, 1B, was also introduced which was rebased on the 3B20D
processor and utilized the same 3B cross-compilation SGS under UNIX as other 3B-
targeted applications[4]. Interestingly, the paper on software development
in [4](p. 109) still makes reference to Programmer's Workbench as of 1982,
implying that nomenclature may have still been the norm at some Bell Labs sites
such as Naperville, Illinois, although I can't tell if they're referring to
PWB as in the branch of UNIX or the environment of make, sccs, etc.
Additionally, is anyone aware of surviving accessible specimens of SWAP
assembly, EPL, or EPLX code or literature beyond the BSTJ references and paper
referenced in the IEEE library below? Thanks for any insights!
- Matt G.
[1] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V58N06_1…
[2] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/810323
[3] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V60N06_1…
[4] - https://bitsavers.org/magazines/Bell_System_Technical_Journal/BSTJ_V62N03_1…
Sorry for the dual list post, I don’t who monitors COFF, the proper place for this.
There may a good timeline of the early decades of Computer Science and it’s evolution at Universities in some countries, but I’m missing it.
Doug McIlroy lived through all this, I hope he can fill in important gaps in my little timeline.
It seems from the 1967 letter, defining the field was part of the zeitgeist leading up to the NATO conference.
1949 ACM founded
1958 First ‘freshman’ computer course in USA, Perlis @ CMU
1960 IBM 1400 - affordable & ‘reliable’ transistorised computers arrived
1965 MIT / Bell / General Electric begin Multics project.
CMU establishes Computer Sciences Dept.
1967 “What is Computer Science” letter by Newell, Perlis, Simon
1968 “Software Crisis” and 1st NATO Conference
1969 Bell Labs withdraws from Multics
1970 GE's sells computer business, including Multics, to Honeywell
1970 PDP-11/20 released
1974 Unix issue of CACM
=========
The arrival of transistorised computers - cheaper, more reliable, smaller & faster - was a trigger for the accelerated uptake of computers.
The IBM 1400-series was offered for sale in 1960, becoming the first (large?) computer to sell 10,000 units - a marker of both effective marketing & sales and attractive pricing.
The 360-series, IBM’s “bet the company” machine, was in full development when the 1400 was released.
=========
Attached is a text file, a reformatted version of a 1967 letter to ’Science’ by Allen Newell, Alan J. Perlis, and Herbert A. Simon:
"What is computer science?”
<https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset/whatiscs.html>
=========
A 1978 masters thesis on Early Australian Computers (back to 1950’s, mainly 1960’s) cites a 17 June 1960 CSIRO report estimating
1,000 computers in the US and 100 in the UK. With no estimate mentioned for Western Europe.
The thesis has a long discussion of what to count as a (digital) ‘computer’ -
sources used different definitions, resulting in very different numbers,
making it difficult to reconcile early estimates, especially across continents & countries.
Reverse estimating to 1960 from the “10,000” NATO estimate of 1968, with a 1- or 2-year doubling time,
gives a range of 200-1,000, including the “100” in the UK.
Licklider and later directors of ARPA’s IPTO threw millions into Computing research in the 1960’s, funding research and University groups directly.
[ UCB had many projects/groups funded, including the CSRG creating BSD & TCP/IP stack & tools ]
Obviously there was more to the “Both sides of the Atlantic” argument of E.W. Dijkstra and Alan Kay - funding and numbers of installations was very different.
The USA had a substantially larger installed base of computers, even per person,
and with more university graduates trained in programming, a higher take-up in private sector, not just the public sector and defence, was possible.
=========
<https://www.acm.org/about-acm/acm-history>
In September 1949, a constitution was instituted by membership approval.
————
<https://web.archive.org/web/20160317070519/https://www.cs.cmu.edu/link/inst…>
In 1958, Perlis began teaching the first freshman-level computer programming course in the United States at Carnegie Tech.
In 1965, Carnegie Tech established its Computer Science Department with a $5 million grant from the R.K. Mellon Foundation. Perlis was the first department head.
=========
From the 1968 NATO report [pg 9 of pdf ]
<http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1968.PDF>
Helms:
In Europe alone there are about 10,000 installed computers — this number is increasing at a rate of anywhere from 25 per cent to 50 per cent per year.
The quality of software provided for these computers will soon affect more than a quarter of a million analysts and programmers.
d’Agapeyeff:
In 1958 a European general purpose computer manufacturer often had less than 50 software programmers,
now they probably number 1,000-2,000 people; what will be needed in 1978?
_Yet this growth rate was viewed with more alarm than pride._ (comment)
=========
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
mailto:sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
Where did chunix (which contains chaos.c) and several other branches of the
v8 /usr/sys tree on TUHS come from? This stuff does not appear in the v8
manual. I don't recall a Lisp machine anywhere near the Unix room, nor any
collaborations that involved a Lisp machine.
Doug
I wonder if anyone can shed any light on the timing and rationale for
the introduction of “word erase” functionality to the kernel terminal
driver. My surface skim earlier leads me to believe it came to Unix
with 4BSD, but it was not reincorporated into 8th Edition or later,
nor did it make it to Plan 9 (which did incorporate ^U for the "line
kill" command). TOPS-20 supports it via the familiar ^W, but I'm not
sure about other PDP-10 OSes (Lars?). Multics does not support it.
VMS does not support it.
What was the proximal inspiration? The early terminal drivers seem to
use the Multics command editing suite (`#` for erase/backspace, `@`
for line kill), though at some point that changed, one presumes as
TTYs fell out of favor and display terminals came to the fore.
- Dan C.
I've been doing some research on Lisp machines and came across an
interesting tidbit: there was Chaosnet support in Unix v8, e.g.
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/sys/chunix/chaos.c
Does anyone remember why that went in? My first guess would be for
interoperability with the Symbolics users at Bell Labs (see Bromley's
"Lisp Lore", 1986), but that's just speculation.
john
Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link to
https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
-Marcus.
> You can always read Josh Fisher's book on the "Bulldog" compiler, I
> believe he did this work at Yale.
Are you thinking of John Ellis’s thesis:
Bulldog: A Compiler for VLIW Architectures
John R. Ellis
February 1985
http://www.cs.yale.edu/publications/techreports/tr364.pdf
Fisher was Ellis’s advisor. The thesis was also published in ACM’s Doctoral Dissertation Award:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262050340/bulldog/
I believe Ellis still has a tape with his thesis software on it, but I don’t know if he’s been able to read it.
Hello Everyone
One of polish academic institutions was getting rid of old IT-related stuff
and they were kind enough to give me all Solaris related stuff, including
lots (and i mean lots) of installation CD-ROMS, documentations, manuals,
and some solaris software, mostly compilers and scientific stuff.
If anyone would be interested feel free to contact me and i'd be happy to
share - almost everything is in more than a few copies and I have no
intention of keeping everything for myself.
Currently all of the stuff is located in Warsaw, Poland.
Best regards,
mjb
--
Maciej Jan Broniarz
> [Tex's] oversetting of lines caused by the periodic failure of the
> paragraph-justification algorithms drove me nuts.
Amen. If Tex can't do what it thinks is a good job, it throws a fit
and violates the margin, hoping to force a rewrite. Fortunately,
one can shut off the line-break algorithm and simply fill greedily.
The command to do so is \sloppy--an ironic descriptor of text
that looks better, albeit not up to Tex's discriminating standard.
Further irony: when obliged to write in Tex, I have resorted to
turning \sloppy mode on globally.
Apologies for airing an off-topic pet peeve,
Doug