17 Mar
2017
17 Mar
'17
12:45 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 1:26 PM, William Pechter <pechter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
DEC's later diagnostics were excellent. They
were copied by a ton of folks
including Masscomp and Alliant who wrote frighteneningly similar
diagnostic supervisors.
Can't speak for Alliant but Masscomp and DEC had shared authorship in he
diagnostics group. The former in C and later in BLISS of course; but the
authors were pretty much the same. If it works, don't mess with it. Also
the Tech's were all originally ex-DEC so it made sense - although the
manufacturing guys were ex-DG.
Actually there was a story I tell. Both Masscomp and DEC were using the
same HW CAD system at one point. DEC has a microcode assembler that had
originally been written in PDP-11 assembler and was running compatibility
mode on the Vax. Masscomp wrote a new microcode assembler that was
"frighteningly similar" in C that tjt the UNIX guys put together with
lex/yacc and the like one weekend for the HW team. Knowledge of this made
its way to the mill. It was also know that DEC has a number of CAD
libraries that the HW guys had been using to make their board layouts
easier -- discussions occurred over beers at the Mau Kaui... tapes some
how fell out of cars one night... and DEC had a microcode assembler running
on Ultrix in C and somehow our HW guys stopped complain about some missing
libraries they wanted.
Clem