🚀 go-pugleaf

'Twas Fri, 6 Jun 2003 09:36:23 -0700 when all comp.sys.unisys stood in awe
as "Chuck Stevens" <charles...@unisys.com> uttered:

>More than that.  Each language (including the language that the operating
>system was written in) had an interpreter.  FORTRAN was word-oriented
>(32-bit?) and looked a whole lot like the Burroughs Large System in
>miniature; the operating system language was a combination of 24-bit
>word-oriented and *bit* addressible memory; and COBOL and RPG were
>"string-oriented" and looked a whole lot like the Burroughs Medium System
>hardware.  I seem to recall also that there were IBM 1401 and Burroughs B500
>interpreters available (which, of course, are language-independent) but I
>didn't know much about them.

Everything Chuck says about the B1000 checks out with my wetware archives.
I was never a B1000 person.  Everything I know is second or third hand.

There were actually three different microcode "machines" which ran RPG.
Originally you ran 1401 RPG on the 1401 machine.  Then they wrote an RPG
compiler which produced object to run on the Cobol microcode.  Then they
designed a machine for RPG and changed the RPG compiler to target that
machine.

I think that Cobol-68 and Cobol-74 ran on slightly different machines.

>And as I perceived it the operating system didn't run the machine,
>an interpreter called GISMO (General Input-Output Service Module) actually
>did that; the SDL object code MCP ran when GISMO decided to run it.  

I have heard of GISMO, but I really don't know what it was.

>There
>was also a MicroMCP to speed some functions up.

The compilers and MCP were written in SDL and ran on the SDL machine.
Rather late in the life cycle of the B1000, they started profiling the MCP
and the compilers to see what functions were heavily used.  Then they
added some special purpose operators to the SDL machine to speed up those
commonly used functions.  I think that's what MicroMCP was.

In some ways the B1000 was doomed by its compatibility.  About 1981, it
became apparent that corporate wanted to axe one of the architectures.
There was no way that Small System or Medium Systems could replace Large
System, so Large was safe.  Medium System was substantially different from
Large, so Medium to Large conversion was a lot harder than Small to Large
conversion.  The Santa Barbarians wanted to convert Medium system to
Small, but the B1900 just didn't have enough gas to replace a fully loaded
B4800.  Detroit terminated the B1000, while Medium (renamed V Series)
continued for another dozen years.  

I was a Medium System guy at the time, so I was happy that my architecture
was continuing, but in hindsight I see the B1000 was a more worthy system.
Could Burroughs have turned B1000 into a PC in the late 1980s?  It would
have been more viable than turning V Series or A Series into a PC.
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