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Article #753

Re: TECO on a DEC-System 10

#753
From: fw... Fred Webb
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1990 15:30
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In article <1215@kl-cs.UUCP> jona...@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) writes:
>Now here's a question for all you trivia merchants.  There was another
>editor of the DEC-10 I used called SOS.  It stood for 'Son Of Stopcat'
>I believe.  What or Who was 'Stopcat'?

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.)

					-- Fred
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References: <1990Jan9.135247.894@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> <1215@kl-cs.UUCP>

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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!snorkelwacker!think!bbn!bbn.com!fwebb
From: fw...@bbn.com (Fred Webb)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: TECO on a DEC-System 10
Message-ID: <50684@bbn.COM>
Date: 10 Jan 90 15:30:29 GMT
References: <1990Jan9.135247.894@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> <1215@kl-cs.UUCP>
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Posted: Wed Jan 10 16:30:29 1990
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