🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <bertschc-051...@ip-23-174.phx.primenet.com>,
Charles Bertsch <bert...@acm.org> wrote:
...
>With General Electric, the assembler was call "GEMAP", Generalized
>something something.  When Honeywell bought the operation, they changed
>the name to GMAP, as well as producing GLOAD from GELOAD.  The OS had been
>named GECOS, Generalized Comprehensive ...  I really think that Honeywell
>should have called it "HOCUS" rather than GCOS.

I was at the Honeywell facilities in Phoenix just after Honeywell
bought the GE computer divisions.  They Explorer Post there got all
its manuals as second-hand; as each new SW release came out, we would
get the old ones.  Until recently, I still had Multics manuals in my
garage, they were disposed of via alt.os.multics, which I recommend if
you really want to know more about the GE600/6000 series.

Any way, for a while I had both GE and Honeywell manuals for some
things.

GEMAP was General Electric Macro Assembly Processer
GMAP was  General Macro Assembly Processer
GECOS was General Electric Comprehensive Operating System
GCOS was General Comprehensive Operating System

At least, that's what was in the early manuals.  Later I saw
Generalized in place of General in some manuals.

GECOS was my first OS, GMAP was my first assembly language (after
learning GCOS Basic, FORTRAN, COBOL and Multics PL1).

I was also extremely fortunate to serve a long internship under John
Wertz, was one of the primary designers of the architecture of the
instructions to be provided by "EIS box" (pronounced ICE box), which
was the primary difference between the (original) 600 and 6000 series.

As I recall, the EIS box was an option on later 600 models, the 6000
had the functionality of the EIS box incorporated into the overall
design of it CPU.

The EIS was the Extended Instruction Set, which had all kinds of
complex instructions for supporting things that COBOL and FORTRAN
liked to do.  I seem to remember one insttuction (moved under edit
with translation), which would move a value from one place to another,
convert formats (say from floating point or BCD to ASCII characters,
with a COBOL-like editting field to put in $-signs, commas, and
decomal points).  One seriously studly instruction :-), but it made
the COBOL benchmarks *scream*, much to the chagrin of CDC and
Burroughs sales people :-)

--tep



-- 
Tom E. Perrine (t...@SDSC.EDU) | San Diego Supercomputer Center 
http://www.sdsc.edu/~tep/     | Voice: +1.619.534.5000
I miss my 36-bit friends: Multics, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20.