6 Feb
2020
6 Feb
'20
5:40 a.m.
Have't seen mention of TOPS-10, or TOPS-20 for that matter... shortening
commands was a great time saver. Problem was, next time they added a
command, muscle memory had to relearn.
On 2/5/2020 5:20 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Wed, 5 Feb 2020, Harald Arnesen wrote:
Norsk Data's OS Sintran was the same, except
that "COLD-START"
(reboot the OS) was defined twice, so you had to spell it out in full.
CDC's KRONOS also allowed abbreviated commands; I grew quite fond of
typing "COMMO" for "COMMON" (attach to the system's common area)
and
"POO" for "POOL" (can't remember what that does, and my books
are long
gone).
Cough cough... The above sequence was how you broke into KRONOS:
COMMON SYSTEM
POOL SYSTEM
(quickly interrupt it)
Get the timing right, and you were in supervisor mode (or whatever it
was called). I remember when I was in the terminal room happily
hacking away,
when the shift supervisor and the centre manager happened to walk in,
exclaiming "Security is pffft!". Terrified, I casually leaned over the
Duckwriter pretending to look for something, to obscure just what I'd
been typing...
I dimly recall that you could log off other users by (somehow) sending
a ^D to their terminal, but I could be confusing that with something
else (this was decades ago).
-- Dave