🚀 go-pugleaf

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