Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

Well, the University of Oregon might disagree with you about the PDP-7. They ran the DECsys monitor, which ISTR was the first such software product from DEC outside the 36-bit line (the PDP-6 and -7 were introduced in the same year). U of O took delivery of their -7 in 1966 and it saw active service for at least three decades, with over thirty doctorates earned based on research performed on the system. Hardly useless.... It's always been a bit of a mystery to me why Thompson and Ritchie decided they needed to write a new executive - UNICS - rather than use DECsys. True, DECsys isn't anything to shout about and Unix is clearly more useful - but IMHO Spacewar! could have been coded in the DECsys 'environment'. I infer that they saw broader utility and application in a more capable executive - which obviously turned out to be true! The U of O PDP-7 is the one currently residing at the Living Computer Museum (I used to maintain it). And what's wrong with OS/8? Minimal, yes - what do you want, Windows Vista? :-) - Ian Sent from my android device. -----Original Message----- From: John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> To: Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org Sent: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 6:38 PM Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped Gregg Levine scripsit: It was. The 18-bit systems were the red-headed stepchild of the DEC world. The PDP-1, PDP-4, and PDP-7 systems had no DEC-supplied operating system, and the PDP-9 only a minimal one, about like OS/8. Not until the terminal 18-bit system, the PDP-15, were PDP-11 class operating systems provided. Consequently, the Bell Labs PDP-7 was essentially useless. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org Awk!" sed Grep. "A fscking python is perloining my Ruby; let me bash him with a Cshell! Vi didn't I mount it on a troff?" --Francis Turner _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs