4 Sep
2018
4 Sep
'18
5:41 a.m.
On Mon, 3 Sep 2018, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Call me memory-challenged (which I am these days), but wasn't Burroughs'
OS known as Master Control Program (MCP - Male Chauvinist Pig)?
-- Dave, who has fond memories of the B1500...
Was Algol 60
any kind of viable alternative at the time?
The operating system for the Burroughs B5000 had been written in
Burroughs Algol. That punctured the widespread belief that OS's were so
particular to the hardware that they had to be written in machine
language. I don't recall how far Burroughs Algol went beyond Algol 60,
nor why Multics did not want to follow that lead. ("Viable" is a
slippery concept when choosing among Turing-complete alternatives.)