🚀 go-pugleaf

> The way I heard it, SOS stood for Son Of Stopgap. Apparently, Stopgap was a
> quick and dirty editor somebody (maybe at Stanford?) wrote, that was
> intended to be used only until a better editor was written.
> 
> Stopgap didn't last, but SOS was written and used as an editor throughout
> the life of the PDP-10. I believe that Dec's patching programs used SOS
> to perform source changes, and that the OS upgrade process used SOS as one
> of the tools in a procedure to merge locally made changes with the Dec's
> changes. (Everybody had source, and everybody made changes. Without some
> systematic procedure for merging updates, nobody would have used the later
> versions of the OS.)
> 
Here at Illinois we also had BOSS, the Bastard Offspring Son of Stopgap,
which was later to become ICE, the Illinois Central Editor, for our CDC
Cyber. CDC later took ICE and it became what is now FSE, the full screen
editor, which is the system editor under NOS 2.  At least that's how I
heard it.

_____
Charley Kline, University of Illinois Computing Services
c-k...@uiuc.edu

"Sing it? I can't even say it!"