Re: [TUHS] AT&T Research

I think that's an interesting topic. I interned at BTL for three summers before coming on permanently in 1967. At the time, it was running an IBM 7090 (later 7094) with a home-grown operating system. Punched card decks were put on mag tape and fed to the system in batches. There was no memory protection, so after running one job the system would checksum itself to make sure it was sane. At one point, someone was testing a sort routine that ran amock and sorted a good portion of the OS, but not the checksum routine, which did an exclusive OR of the instructions and attempted to run the next job. The instruction core dump was quite amusing. One of the first computer games I became aware of happened on that mainframe. It was called "Darwin", and was a contest. Each contestant submitted a card deck, and there was a monitor that ran the program--its object was to attack other programs by returning an address. If the address was protected, you died and the other program reproduced itself in your place. Otherwise, they died and you reproduced yourself. The game ran for several weeks until a program described to me as "all teeth, claws and sex organs" proved to be unbeatable. In my opinion, the initial view of Unix at Bell Labs was quite negative. After all, these were the people who promised Multics with great hype and failed to deliver. When I started work in 1067, I was given a memo that began "In six months, we expect the dominant programming language at Bell Labs to be PL/1." There were some amazing simulation programs written in assembler with macros -- all of these were lost when the comp center pushed everyone on to FORTRAN. I actually think it was a good thing that Unix in the early days was not taken seriously. Having users is a mixed blessing when the rate of change was rapid. For example, the transition from B to C to C with strong typing would have driven most application developers bonkers when they were trying to serve their customers. One of the things that got me interested in management was visiting a number of groups with my then boss, Eliot Pinson, to try to "sell" Unix. It was amazing to me that some groups that urgently needed it were unwilling to try it, while groups that were doing just fine without it embraced it and ran with it. The technical people I met all seemed competent -- it must be the management that was the difference... --- On 2020-07-11 13:30, Warren Toomey wrote: