🚀 go-pugleaf

>From article <1990Jan9....@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>, by ro...@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Royal Ontario Museum):
> A few years ago I was working on a DEC System 10 which had an editor
> called TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, as I recall).  Anyway, .....

I'll bite.

I used a DEC-10 for many years.  The way that a lot of monitor commands
were processed was to pass them off to a program called COMPIL.  This
took whatever you'd typed and created temporary files to instruct some
other program and then ran that program.  'make' was one of the commands
it got, so when you type 'make love' it printed the message 'Not War?' and
then kicked off TECO.

Another program called MIC (Macro Interpreted Command) was sort of like
a shell programming language.  It had a GOTO command and if you typed
'GOTO HELL' it would respond 'Get Stuffed'.

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'?

-- 
  ______    JANET :jonathan@uk.ac.keele.cs     Jonathan Knight,
    /       BITNET:jonathan%cs.kl.ac.uk@ukacrl Department of Computer Science
   / _   __ other :jona...@cs.keele.ac.uk     University of Keele, Keele,
(_/ (_) / / UUCP  :...!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan      Staffordshire.  ST5 5BG.  U.K.

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

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'?

According to 'The Hacker's Dictionary', SOS was the acronym for 
'Son Of Stopgap'. The original editor, Stopgap, apparently was a quick
hack that became a regular feature. The Dictionary describes SOS 
(and Stopgap) in a somewhat... negative manner :-)
_______________________________________________________________________________
 | |   |   |    |\ | |   /|\ | John K{llen         "God hates me. *That's* 
 | |\ \|/ \|  * |/ | |/|  |  | PoBox 11215          what it is." "Hate Him 
 | |\ /|\  |\ * |\ |   |  |  | Stanford CA 94309    back; it works for me."
_|_|___|___|____|_\|___|__|__|_jkl@csli.stanford.edu___________________________

>From: fw...@bbn.com (Fred Webb)

> Stopgap didn't last, but SOS was written and used as an editor throughout
> the life of the PDP-10. 

 Ahem. I believe the DECUS "Mature Systems Group" would object to that past
tense......

 This bunch can get fairly militant over their machines (they do some
interesting T-shirts some years commenting on DECs 'mistakes'.....like
the VAX).

 It's understandable really. The parts I like best in the 10 seem to be
non-issues nowadays ("Why would I care about Assembly language programming
ease?" is typical) and there are young DEC sales reps talking about the
new machines as "DEC's First Mainframe" which also can tee them off.
 


-- 
 -dave fetrow-                     fet...@bones.biostat.washington.edu
 dfetrow@uwalocke (bitnet)         {uunet}!uw-beaver!uw-entropy!fetrow 

    "CP/M: Remember when fast, small, useful and clean were good?"

In article <1215@kl-cs.UUCP> jona...@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) writes:
>
>Another program called MIC (Macro Interpreted Command) was sort of like
>a shell programming language.  It had a GOTO command and if you typed
>'GOTO HELL' it would respond 'Get Stuffed'.
>
>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'?


Son of Stopgap.  Stopgap was an absolutely wretched text editor (so, for
that matter, was SOS ... long live STECO! ;-)

gkn

In article <13...@milton.acs.washington.edu> fet...@milton.acs.washington.edu (David Fetrow) writes:
>
> This bunch can get fairly militant over their machines (they do some
>interesting T-shirts some years commenting on DECs 'mistakes'.....like
>the VAX).
>

Sure thing -- classic T shirts include slogans like "If your computer doesn't
have 36 bits then you're not playing with a full DEC" remain popular.

gkn

In article <10...@ucsd.Edu> g...@ucsd.edu (Gerard K. Newman) writes:
:In article <13...@milton.acs.washington.edu> fet...@milton.acs.washington.edu (David Fetrow) writes:
:>
:> This bunch can get fairly militant over their machines (they do some
:>interesting T-shirts some years commenting on DECs 'mistakes'.....like
:>the VAX).
:>
:
:Sure thing -- classic T shirts include slogans like "If your computer doesn't
:have 36 bits then you're not playing with a full DEC" remain popular.

I heard that there was (is?) an Australian vacuum cleaner company called
"Vax" and that they had an advertising slogan that went, "Nothing sucks
like a Vax."  Full page ads from Aussie magazines were popular items in
certain parts of Colorado Springs and Marlboro, so my source informs me.

Around this time, in a Tops-20 Monitor Internals class at DEC's Bedford (?)
training facility, somebody patched the running monitor on the class system
so that its logon banner was the same as the Australian vaccum cleaner
company's slogan.  Things got pretty exciting when one of the instructors
came through the terminal room showing around some bigwig customer types.

He pointed to some terminals, explaining that they were connected to a Vax.
Then he sauntered up to a terminal and said, "These terminals over here are
connected to a PDP-10 running Tops-20."  And then he hit control-C to get
the monitor's attention.  Since there was no job logged in on that
terminal, the logon banner appeared...

I love Tops-20.

-- 
John Wilkes

wil...@mips.com   -OR-   {ames, decwrl, pyramid}!mips!wilkes

>According to 'The Hacker's Dictionary', SOS was the acronym for 
>'Son Of Stopgap'. The original editor, Stopgap, apparently was a quick
>hack that became a regular feature. The Dictionary describes SOS 
>(and Stopgap) in a somewhat... negative manner :-)

While I can't speak for the authors and the original namer of SOS, my first
introduction to SOS was as "Slab of Sh_t".
--
Don't demand respect from others if you have none for yourself.
				-- Clay Bond
(Another Clay-quote I wish *I* had said first!)

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'?

It was actually ``Son of StopGAP''.  Early work required an editor, and
the editor was therefore a Stopgap.  Later there was a Brother-in-Law of
Stopgap.  [see JARGON.TXT or ``The Hacker's Dictionary''].

ian



-- 
Ian G Batten, BT Fulcrum - i...@fulcrum.bt.co.uk - ...!uunet!ukc!fulcrum!igb

In article <1215@kl-cs.UUCP>, jona...@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) writes:
> From article <1990Jan9....@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>, by ro...@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Royal Ontario Museum):
> > A few years ago I was working on a DEC System 10 which had an editor
> > called TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, as I recall).  Anyway, .....
> 
> I'll bite.
> 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'?
> 
> -- 
>     /       BITNET:jonathan%cs.kl.ac.uk@ukacrl Department of Computer Science
>    / _   __ other :jona...@cs.keele.ac.uk     University of Keele, Keele,
> (_/ (_) / / UUCP  :...!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan      Staffordshire.  ST5 5BG.  U.K.

I remember it was "Son of Stopgap".  Stopgap was supposed to have
been a line number oriented editor that was written in a hurry to
satisfy people who had been used to this type of editor on GE
systems (who DEC was trying to convert to PDP-10s).  Somebody did
some improvements on it and it became "Son".  Later on (~77?) DEC
finally made more improvements and SOS became a very respectable
editor.  You cound enter a line and move around in it with a
pointer almost like a screen editor, except all the TTYs had was
backspace and null.  Worked fine though, I used it a lot.

-- 

Jim Harvey                        |      "Ask not for whom the bell
Michigan Bell Telephone           |      tolls and you will only pay
29777 Telegraph                   |      Station-to-Station rates."
Southfield, Mich. 48034           | 

ulysses!gamma!mibte!jbh
     

> 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!"

In article <11...@csli.Stanford.EDU> j...@csli.stanford.edu (John Kallen) writes:
>According to 'The Hacker's Dictionary', SOS was the acronym for 
>'Son Of Stopgap'. The original editor, Stopgap, apparently was a quick
>hack that became a regular feature. The Dictionary describes SOS 
>(and Stopgap) in a somewhat... negative manner :-)

Gee, I liked it.  Of course, I hadn't used much else at that point.

A friend of mine later went on to write GOS (Grandson of Stopgap).
-- 
I already have a boyfriend, so you needn't talk to me or send me
e-mail if you consider that "wasting your time."

wil...@mips.COM (John Wilkes) wrote:
  
> I heard that there was (is?) an Australian vacuum cleaner company called
> "Vax" and that they had an advertising slogan that went, "Nothing sucks
> like a Vax."

No.  I think they're a British firm - at least, their machines (combination
vacuum cleaners and carpet shampooers) are on sale at electricity board
showrooms here.  They are bright orange, the same colour ICL mainframes
used to be before corporate beige took over.  The blurb is pretty funny if
you read it as advertising a computer.  The slogan you're thinking of is
for a rival firm - "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux".
-- 
Jack Campin  *  Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank
Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, SCOTLAND.    041 339 8855 x6044 wk  041 556 1878 ho
INTERNET: jack%cs.gl...@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk  USENET: jack@glasgow.uucp
JANET: jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs     PLINGnet: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack

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'?

No, no, no! That's "Son of Stopgap"! As in the sequel to a stopgap kludge
of an editor that they wrote cause they had to have something running
really quick.

===============================================================================
Roger Ivie

35 S 300 W
Logan, Ut.  84321
(801) 752-8633
===============================================================================

In article <2931@mibte.UUCP>, jbh@mibte.UUCP (James Harvey) writes:
>          You cound enter a line and move around in it with a
> pointer almost like a screen editor, except all the TTYs had was
> backspace and null.  Worked fine though, I used it a lot.
> 

About the ONLY thing I liked about SOS was that the line editing
commands were very similar (read: a clone) of the old TRS-80 Level II
BASIC editing commands. Since I had hacked a TRS-80 extensively before
going to college, I felt right at home with SOS.

Of course, it wasn't long afterwards that I discovered real editors like
EDT and TECO.

Anyone ever use full screen CANDE on a Burroughs TD830 terminal?

===============================================================================
Roger Ivie

35 S 300 W
Logan, Ut.  84321
(801) 752-8633
===============================================================================

In article <1990Jan11.2...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> kl...@tuna.cso.uiuc.edu (Charley Kline) writes:
- > Stopgap didn't last, but SOS was written and used as an editor throughout
- > the life of the PDP-10.
- > 
- 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.

	At Iowa State University, SOS lasted long past DEC
offical support for it on our VAXen.  I seem to remember that
support for SOS was discontinued in about '83, but at last
check, it was still on the VAXen, and still used by a number of
people...  Why I was even quite proficent with it at one point.

	The reason for SOS's long life at ISU?  All sorts of
ADM-3a's and TVI910's.  EDT had no idea how to deal with them,
certainly not in page mode, and line mode EDT wasn't something I
ever enjoyed.
-- 
Eric Schnoebelen	er...@egsner.cirr.com		schn...@convex.com
	"Ford, If I were to ask where in the hell we are, would I
		 regret it?" -- Aurther Dent, HHG

In article <1215@kl-cs.UUCP> jona...@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) writes:
>>From article <1990Jan9....@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>, by ro...@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Royal Ontario Museum):
>> A few years ago I was working on a DEC System 10 which had an editor
>> called TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, as I recall).  Anyway, .....

YEAH! Real Editors For Real People! Groot!

>Another program called MIC (Macro Interpreted Command) was sort of like
>a shell programming language.  It had a GOTO command and if you typed
>'GOTO HELL' it would respond 'Get Stuffed'.

One release of MIC responded to the "goto hell" command with

?MICERR- halted in purgatory
.


>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'?

StopGAP.

Stopgap was an *evil* *evil* thing that someone hacked out to
ship with the first KA10s as a system editor. It emulated an even
older and more disgusting editor on GE iron and was a royal pain
to use. SOS (what users usually said after using it) was a minor
improvement. It appeared a little before the version of TECO that
DEC swiped from the AI lab at MIT began circulating widely. After
TECO appeared, only pipe stress freaks and crystallography
weenies used SOS.

I wish someone would port TECO to Unix. I miss it.


>  ______    JANET :jonathan@uk.ac.keele.cs     Jonathan Knight,


-- 
David Boyes       Disclaimer: Rice University couldn't find an opinion
dbo...@rice.edu      with both hands, a map, a compass, and an escort
                     squad of US Marines. This isn't the one
		     they're looking for either.

In article <42...@brazos.Rice.edu> dbo...@brazos.rice.edu (David Boyes) writes:
>In article <1215@kl-cs.UUCP> jona...@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) writes:
>>>From article <1990Jan9....@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca>, by ro...@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Royal Ontario Museum):
>>> A few years ago I was working on a DEC System 10 which had an editor
>>> called TECO (Text Editor and COrrector, as I recall).  Anyway, .....
>
>YEAH! Real Editors For Real People! Groot!
>
>I wish someone would port TECO to Unix. I miss it.

Actually someone did write one.  You can get it via anonomous ftp from
j.cc.purdue.edu.  It has some bugs though and the author put in some
VT100 specific stuff.  (Don't ask me why; I'll never understand why
people don't put in dumb terminal fall-back modes at least.)

Have Fun.

Brian L. Stuart
Department of Computer Science
Purdue University

In article <16...@cc.usu.edu> SL...@cc.usu.edu (Roger Ivie) writes:
-
-About the ONLY thing I liked about SOS was that the line editing
-commands were very similar (read: a clone) of the old TRS-80 Level II
-BASIC editing commands.

You have it exactly backwards.  The Trash-80 BASIC editing commands were a
clone of SOS.  I used SOS (once, went immediately back to TECO) in 1975.
The Trash-80 didn't exist then.
-- 
Larry Campbell                          The Boston Software Works, Inc.
camp...@redsox.bsw.com                 120 Fulton Street
wjh12!redsox!campbell                   Boston, MA 02109

In article <34...@mips.mips.COM> wil...@mips.COM (John Wilkes) writes:
>   Around this time, in a Tops-20 Monitor Internals class at DEC's Bedford (?)
>   training facility, somebody patched the running monitor on the class system
>   so that its logon banner was the same as the Australian vaccum cleaner
>   company's slogan.  Things got pretty exciting when one of the instructors
>   came through the terminal room showing around some bigwig customer types.

This sounds familiar.

In 1983, I and my (at that time) boss attended the TOPS-20 Monitor
Structures and TOPS-20 Monitor Internals couses in Bedford.

The machine used for the Structures course was a KL10 which
in addition was beeing used for programming classes and,
(I think) for courses in WPS+, mainly attended by secretaries
and such. We didn't get any privileges on this machine, just access to
the monitor source, which we also had on fiche.

After the first week, we moved into the Internals course, and now we
were assigned privileged accounts on a second system, a KS10 that we
had for ourselves. Of course, the first thing my boss did was to
list the users on both systems, and determine which of the DEC
employees had accounts on both machines. He then listed the passwords
of all these users on the KS10 (no password encryption on the -20,
remember! No memory quotas eighter, but that is another story...)

He then took the username/password list over to the KL10 and started
going through the list. And guess what? He got into a privileged
account on first try. Big surprise.

>From there is was small fry to patch his own privilege bit, log in as
himself, start FILDDT, and patch the "Nothing Sucks Like A VAX"-message
into the location of the Welcome banner (which originally read
TOPS-20-IN-BLUE, if my memory serves me correctly).

The next day we had a very irate suit come into our classroom and
demand an explanation for this outrage. Which everybody present,
excluding our instructor (hi, Eileen, you out there?), found
extraordinarily funny.

Stopgap: written at Stanford AI Lab before 1971 or so
SOS (Son of Stopgap): written there in about 1972

at CMU:
BILOS (Brother-in-law of Stopgap): font (``character set'') editor for
the XGP, written about 1973; a bitmap editor
SILOS (Sister-in-law of Stopgap): font editor for the GDP vector
displays, also written about 1973; thus, a vector-graphics font editor.

All dates should be taken with grains of salt; I arrived at CMU in 1974
and all these things had already been created, and Lee Erman (and
others) had already brought SOS to CMU from SAIL.

Just for the record, TECO stands for Tape Editor and COrrector as it
was originally desigened to be a character editor for paper tapes.

ctp
-----
Clyde T. Poole -- Technical Coordinator, Facilities and Equipment
Univ. of Texas at Austin        ARPA/CS/NSFnet: c...@cs.utexas.edu
Dept. of Computer Sciences      UUCP: {uunet,harvard}!cs.utexas.edu!ctp
Taylor Hall 2.124               BITNET: ctp@UTADNX  SPAN: UTSPAN::UTADNX::CTP
Austin, TX  78712-1188          VOICE: (512) 471-9551   FAX: (512) 471-0548