🚀 go-pugleaf

AndyW <An...@nojunqmail.com> writes:
> I tried it.
> It is just as awful as the first time I used it. Thankfully PCs were
> coming in at the time and we switched to them after a couple of years
> with the prime.... sorry Pr1me, must remember the '1'
> I do recall that their security was appalling and it was an easy
> matter to go 'Up' and 'LD' to find the lecturers' directories and then
> 'Down' to a directory to get the lesson plans and assignments.

with failure of FS and the mad rush to get products back into product
pipelines ... 3033, 3081 (and 370/xa) was kicked off in parallel.
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm

370/xa design/architecture documents were eventually known as "811" for
their nov1978 publication date.

POK also managed to convince corporate to kill vm/370 product and
transfer the (burlington mall, had originally been on 3rd flr 545tech
sq, taking over the IBM Boston Program Center space, before moving out
to vacant IBM SBC bldg at burlington mall) development group to POK to
work on MVS/XA (claiming that otherwise they wouldn't be able to make
MVS/XA ship date). They weren't going to inform the group until just
before the move ... to minimize people that might escape. There was a
leak and numerous people manage to escape in the rt128 vacinity. A lot
went to DEC ... this was late 76, early 77 ... so they would have been
there for early 11/780 work ... introduced oct1977
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX-11

however, some went to Prime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Computer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS#Internals

The unusual choice of FORTRAN for the OS programming language had to do
with the people who founded Prime. They had worked for Honeywell on a
NASA project.[9] FORTRAN was the language they had used both at NASA
and, for many of them, at MIT.

Since Prime's hardware did not perform byte addressing, there was no
impetus to create a C compiler. Late models of the hardware were
eventually modified to support I-mode, and programs compiled in C.

Later, around version 18, a version of PL/1, called PL/P, became the
high level language of choice within PRIMOS, and the PL/P and Modula-2
languages were used in the Kernel. Furthermore, some new PRIMOS
utilities were written in SP/L, which was similar to PL/P.

... snip ...

trivia: tech sq. was two story polaroid bldg facing the street. 545 tech
sq with science center, project mac (multics) etc. was on one side
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545
and
http://www.multicians.org/multics.html

identical bldg. on the opposite side (from 545) included MIT Urban
system lab with CP67/CMS datacenter ... story about USL
http://www.multicians.org/thvv/360-67.html

NASA was the fourth side of the sq (on backside across from Polaroid
bldg.) ...  more about tech sq.
http://news.mit.edu/2004/techsquare-0317
and
http://multicians.org/tech-square.html
above mentions one of the Prime founders was there at Honeywell
& NASA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Poduska

posts mentioning FS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys

other trivia, Endicott eventually acquired the VM370 product mission
... but had to reconstitute a development group from scratch.

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970