21 Jan
2017
21 Jan
'17
6:38 p.m.
On Thu, 19 Jan 2017, Steve Johnson wrote:
PCC ended up being ported to many dozen different
architectures, so it's
quite possible, but I don't recall it being done. It was kind of a
dinosaur by the early 70's. I'm not even sure that it had memory
protection, and it certainly didn't have paging. And the I/O system was
strange. So porting Unix would have been next to impossible.
My memory of the Kyber (as we called them; we had a 72) was that it was
not character-addressable, but 60-bit word-addressable, thus making string
handling somewhat difficult. Don't get me started on its utterly broken
architecture... I have thankfully lost my programming manual for the
beast.
The main thing I remember about the 6600 was that it
didn't have parity
bits on its memory. So people used to run the same program three times
and if two of the answers agreed, they published...
Parity only slowed it down, and besides, hardware never failed...
My fondest memory of the thing was its command completion; I would start
to type "O, TR" and it would fill out "O, TRANSACTION TERMINAL
STATUS".
Which reminds me that my worst memory was its console keyboard, with "0"
on the left...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."