Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol!cica!iuvax!purdue!bu.edu!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!tut!santra!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!dcl-cs!aber-cs!rupert!pcg From: pcg@rupert.cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Late Bloomers Revisited Message-ID: Date: 28 Dec 89 21:36:31 GMT References: <1517@aber-cs.UUCP> <5455@bd.sei.cmu.edu> Sender: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP Organization: Coleg Prifysgol Cymru Lines: 58 In article <5455@bd.sei.cmu.edu> firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth) writes: 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. The *hardware* was the same (mostly). The OS was, I understand, quite different. Manchester had their OS, and Cambridge rolled their own. [ ... nice reminiscences ...] 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. This is a funny case of *double* confusion. The Cambridge TSS that inspired Multics was the one done at MIT, Cambridge, for the one old IBM machine (that had been modified to support base+limit "virtual memory"). Multics was then largely inspired by the virtual memory work done in the UK (minus, unfortunately, the reverse page map used in ATLAS, which is another great idea whose time has not yet come, modulo the ROMP...) and by the software environent of that MIT CTSS, plus a slew of new ideas on protection, which eventually resurfaced in the capability bandwagon. As to Multics, I read once that the sale of GE's computer interests to Honeywell was the direct cause of Multics being deemphasized, as the new owners wanted to take time to study their acquisition and froze all new developments. I have read that the stop to Multics was what made many major US corporations (the fat part of the market) that were seriously considering it as an alternative to IBM (so seriously that IBM hastily did TSS/370 as a countermove -- BTW, TSS/370 was not that bad or slow either) stop waiting and choose the IBM 360/370 line and its horrid OS for good, and consigned posterity to ABENDs. By the way, a personal note: I have always had this passion for understanding the history of computer technology. In the forgotten lateral valleys of such history there are a number of very interesting things, mostly languages (from Neliac to EL/1), but also architectures, operating systems, concepts, etc... Many thanks to those that were there (Ritchie, Firth, Farber...) for recollecting. I was not there; I am too young for that, and I have only had the pleasure of skeeing out and reading now yellowish books and magazines and reports abandoned on some dusty shelf, and trying out all that I could to get a feel (yes, I wrote programs in several odd language on several odd systems just to learn: "Because it was there" :->). -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi | ARPA: pcg%cs.aber.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Dept of CS, UCW Aberystwyth | UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg Penglais, Aberystwyth SY23 3BZ, UK | INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk