5 Dec
2018
5 Dec
'18
2:16 p.m.
On 5 Dec 2018, at 04:48, Paul McJones
<paul(a)mcjones.org> wrote:
About 1972 the Department of Computer Science at Strathclyde University in Scotland had an
operating system implemented on a front-end-processor (Icant remember the make) that
allowed the submission and control of jobs to a “mainframe” - an ICL 1904s.
The operating system was written in STAB - a language initially designed and developed by
Professor Andrew Colin - and loosely modelled on BCPL.
My memory is that the FEP was about 12 19” racks, it supported about 15-20 users and did
not lose your files terribly often ;-)
On Dec 4, 2018, Greg 'groggy' Lehey
<grog(a)lemis.com> wrote:
The original Tandem OS (called Guardian at the time) was written in Tandem's TAL
(Transaction Application Language, amongst other productions), a vague evolution of
HP's SPL that looked more like Algol, starting in about 1974. That is also the
earliest I know of an operating system being implemented entirely in a high level
language.
Most likely the earliest operating system written in a high-level language was the one
for the Burroughs B5000 (early 1960s), written in a dialect of Algol 60. Others: Multics,
written in PL/1 (starting in mid 1960s), the operating system for the Berkeley Computer
Corporation’s BCC-500, written in BCC SPL (system programming language) (late 1960s), OS6
by Stoy and Strachey, written in BCPL (early 1970s), Xerox Alto OS, written in BCPL (about
1974).