Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sei!firth
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Late Bloomers Revisited
Message-ID: <5455@bd.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 27 Dec 89 15:35:19 GMT
References: <1517@aber-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 32

In article <1517@aber-cs.UUCP> pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:

>I was not there, and Dennis Ritchie was, but I seem to recollect reading
>that the Multics project at MIT was started *before* PL/1 was designed, and
>the MIT people, who had good links with Cambridge UK (and some with
>Manchester), and were inspired by Atlas and Titan as well as CTSS, had
>decided to use BCPL.

This seems very confused to me.  First, 'Atlas' and 'Titan' are the
same thing; the machine at Cambridge called 'Titan' was a prototype
Atlas II.  As far as I know, it's only relevance to the MIT machine
is that both used a virtual memory technique derived from the
original Manchester design.  Moreover, the Titan was programmed largely
in machine code; there was a scientific programming language called
'Titan Autocode' made available in 1965 for number crunchers.  In
contrast to Multics, it had no real user file system; your files were
on magnetic tape and your directory was a sheet of paper in your desk
drawer on which you wrote down what you had written to which physical
block of tape.

The Cambridge Time Sharing System came into use only in 1967/68; I
remember watching the first remote terminal being installed in 1967.
Before that, you had to walk in the side door on Corn Exchange Street
and hang your little bag on the hook, containing the paper tape and
the job request slip.  So it is unlikely to have had much influence
on Multics, whose basic design was done by the end of 1966.

The 'Multics' project proper was started in October 1965; the second
report of the IBM/SHARE committee designing NPL, which contains the
greater part of what became PL/I, was issued in June 1964.  This
should settle the issue of chronological priority; it is of course
much harder to decide questions of influence or inspiration.