Arrgh. Dyson DC01 poorly

[Bob Eager]

No, MicroVAXes...but the leccy bill is bad with all the PCs...

Gas powered PCs anyone. I bet even IMM hasn't got solar panels on each one yet...

[Bob Eager]

Not allowed to say IPL on a DEC machine! :-)

[Andy Hall]

Oh of course. That's an IBMism. What did DEC call it?

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[Zymurgy]

Well, i've worked on all the early stuff TBH, the only thing i didn't touch was a PDP/11 or a MicroVAX 1. Had a MicroVAX 2 though !

Still a youngster, me .. ;-)

P.

[Bob Eager]

Key-in bootstrap....I think.

[Bob Eager]

I worked on a special purpose OS for a PDP-11 (and did a compiler for it). Lessee...11/03, 11/10, 11/20, 11/34, 11/40, LSI/11....!

Hah!

[Huge]

Pah. Newbie. I've worked on PDP-8s.

[Huge]

Rebooting.

[Bob Eager]

I did...just once. Have a nice emaulator running here....can telnet into OS/8....!

Then there was Mercury Autocode....!

[PoP]

Ah, the dear old PDP-8.

My first-ever computer "program" was entering microcode to copy a paper tape from a reader to a punch.

The PDP's which I had access to back in the early 70's had a programming language called FoCal - Formula Calculator. Mind you these days I think that FoCal might refer to IMM's internal language..... ;)

PoP

Sending email to my published email address isn't guaranteed to reach me.

[Pete C]

How many PCs...?

cheers, Pete.

[Bob Eager]

Five permanently on...others on demand, no more than 3 or 4 more at once though.

[Owain]

"Zymurgy" wrote | "Bob Eager" wrote | > Andy Hall wrote: | > > >heh. I think we're getting way off the topic of DC01's, but | > > >i'm originally a VMS specialist (started on 11/750's through | > > >6XXX's, 4XXX's and Alphas) now working on various Unix | > > >variants myself. | > A latecomer, eH? I started on a 780...before the 750 existed!

I remember sharing a Vax 11/780 with about 6MB of RAM with forty-odd other students at university ... it was slow, even by the standards of the day.

Oh, the joys of word-processing on Vecce.

| Well, i've worked on all the early stuff TBH, the only thing i | didn't touch was a PDP/11 or a MicroVAX 1. Had a MicroVAX 2 though !

I had a Dragon 32 :-(

But it was still faster than sharing a Vax 11/780 with about 6MB of RAM with forty-odd other students :-)

I also remember a secondhand Honeywell 6080 at Aber that used to belong to NASA and them just introducing a new thing called TSS - Time Sharing Service - as though a stack of cards wasn't too good for students already.

Owain

[Witchy]

I started on PDP11s at college, though smaller ones like the 11/44, then migrated to uPDPs at my first job, then the VAX 11/730 and then it mushroomed :)

Got a uVAX I here that I'm working on 'cos either its RD52 or RQDX1 has gone south.....processor passes its tests though so that's a big worry out of the way.

-- cheers,

witchy/binarydinosaurs

[Witchy]

Dave Cutler was one of the 3 original VMS programming team members (though he wasn't there for that long) and went to Ken Olsen with the idea of a desktop OS for personal computers, but since Ken is famously quoted as saying 'I don't believe there's a reason for anyone to have a computer in the home' amongst other things the idea was rebuffed so Dave upped sticks and went to uncle bill. Where apparently he didn't last too long either.

Back then it was things like process control and virtual memory management....I knew some NT programmers and they said it was very much like VMS for that side of things but they didn't elaborate on the rest of the 'user experience'.

*strokes AMD webserver with Alpha 21064 FSB* :)

-- cheers,

witchy/binarydinosaurs

[Huge]

I don't think you mean microcode. AFAIK, the '8 didn't have programmable microcode. You probably mean "machine code" which is something else entirely.

[Huge]

Where is he now? As an ex-RSX-11(M,S) programmer, he was always a hero of mine.

[Bob Eager]

I agree...but in fact the PDP-8 did have something called 'microprogramming' which is where the confusion probably arises.

Group1 and Group 2 instructions were addressless instructions, with function determined by a bit code. You were allowed to use combinations of bits; for example, to load -1 (all 1s) into the accumulator, you combined CLA (clear accumulator) and CMA (complement accumulator). There were many more.

(I *have* written microcode...but for a mainframe!)

[John Laird]

I've worked with VMS for 20-odd years, but despite this I still haven't come across what looks to be an entirely reliable biography of the guy. While he did write a lot of the original VMS kernel, he left the team after V1.0 and there has been a hell of a lot of development since then. So, he sowed some great seeds but there are many other talented O/S engineers to thank. He did not contribute to the development of clustering, for example, an area where VMS still stands head and shoulders above the rest. Imho...

Afaik, he fell out with DEC management over the cancellation of Mica, the possible VMS successor on new RISC hardware codenamed Prism (pretty ironic given that the Alpha eventually supplanted Vax). History tells us he moved to Microsoft in 1988.

Although some sources claim he left MS in 95, I know one NT kernel developer who started there after that and Cutler was definitely still around a few years later. Although he did seem to have a somewhat loose and creative contractural arrangement - when supposed to be at work he would sometimes be on vacation, and while supposedly on vacation could often be found in at weekends rewriting someone else's code :-)

[Steve Firth]

I'm an ex-RSX-11M (Systime) programmer. How come I'm not a hero of yours?