Authored by: BJ on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 03:52 PM EDT |
Apologies. I know what you mean, and maybe you
know what I mean. Melancholy.
bjd
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 04:14 PM EDT |
RT-11 was the first OS that I had "hands on" experience with. All my
prior programming work was "batch mode" (punched cards). The machine
I used to run RT-11 was not even a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer!
It was an Andromeda LSI-11. The operating system and software came from DEC,
but the hardware was a "clone". DEC was aware of these clones but did
not take any legal action.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 04:26 PM EDT |
Not quite the same thing, but in my early days I used to customise bits
of the PRIMOS O/S on our Pr1me minis. I miss coding in FORTRAN IV,
F77, pl1/g plp, spl, cpl, even COBOL![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- RT-11 Linker - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 18 2012 @ 10:26 PM EDT
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Authored by: Magpie on Saturday, May 19 2012 @ 04:33 AM EDT |
I remember those days well. It started in 1974 when I was involved in a project
to automate the production and printing of some of Lloyds Shipping Publications.
We used an early copy of RSX-11D and developed the solution in a mixture of
Macro-11 assembler and Fortran. This was before "product" databases,
and I wrote the database from scratch for the part of the system.
Later, I was lead designer of a Remote Control and monitoring (SCADA) product
and we used RSX-11M. I wrote what I now know to be a RAID 1 disk driver for
pair of RK05 Disks. Of course in those days the term RAID wasn't on my radar - I
just did it because it saved us having to use two computer systems instead. I
also wrote a graphic display driver so we could output mimic diagrams on TV
monitors.
During the early 1980s I found a memory management bug in RSX-11M. At the time
we were putting a system into the Middle East to control Oil (can't remember the
exact details). I had the source of all of RSX-11M available, because as you
say you compiled from source to set up the system for your hardware
configuration. The well known designer of Windows NT, Dave Cutler, had his name
all over the piece I fixed.
That was one of the last pieces of paid technical work that I did - even at that
time I was the manager of the product division and the fix was more about saving
the cost of my man on site - until just recently when I have semi retired, but
am making some additional income writing software again.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: kattemann on Saturday, May 19 2012 @ 12:01 PM EDT |
But still people wrote awful code.
We still do.
Although my code is improving, now that I am learning Java.
Oops - is my
Uni allowed to teach it and let us write and run Java programs on the campus
computers? (Red Hat in my favorite lab room)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 19 2012 @ 03:09 PM EDT |
My experience was with CDC and they did the same thing. As a hardware engineer,
when I wanted to learn how a compiler worked, I just printed out the source code
and dug in.
There weren't many doing COBOL on CDC equipment, as the RISCy machines
originally had poor support for sorting(!) and the later 'Compare-Move-Unit' was
an option.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2012 @ 10:04 AM EDT |
I liked the VAXs but I loved the PDPs. On the PDP, I mainly used RSX-11 and a
little RSTS. Showing my age, I even used RSX-11A. Talk about a barebones
OS! I ran into that when I did some work for DuPont. That PDP monitored
and controlled one rather large machine for tracking, sorting and 'dumping'
pallets of product. The program for that was read in using punch paper tape.
It's the only time I ran into punch tape. Cards I used many times, tape only
once.
RSX-11M/M-Plus was a wonder to work with. I miss it. :) I thought it was fun
to modify the OS. On a MicroPDP, I had to add 4 serial boards and had to
hack to OS to get that last board to work. You could do so much with PDPs.
These days, among other things, I play with my 9yo & 11yo granddaughters
building and programming robots. LOVE IT![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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