[TUHS] Re: origin of null-terminated strings

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 &lt;pugs78(a)gmail.com&gt; 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 &lt;clemc(a)ccc.com&gt; 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(a)dartmouth.edu&gt; 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 >> >> >> >>