On 3/11/21 12:00 PM, Mike Knell wrote:
On 11.03.2021,
at 16:26, Dan Halbert <halbert(a)halwitz.org> wrote:
In 1972, while in high school, I went to an Intel seminar on the 8008. There I met a Bell
Labs scientist who gave me a sample 8008 and invited me for a visit at some NJ Bell Labs
facility. That group had a timesharing system of some kind, but it was not Unix. I was
also given a Bell Labs speech synthesis kit after meeting one of the speech scientists who
happened to be in on the same Saturday. I have searched my attic but can't find
further details. Would any of you alumni recall what this other timesharing system might
have been?
Not an alumnus of anything (alas, I am far too young and not clever
enough), but maybe this was GECOS? (Origin of the name of the pw_gecos field in UNIX..)
Mike
I do not think it was GECOS. I have a memory of him demonstrating a
FOCAL- or BASIC-esque language running on some commercial minicomputer,
but it was not one of those and I don't think it was a DEC machine.
Perhaps it was not timesharing, but he showed it to me from his office
terminal, I think, not in a lab.