[inforoots] Operating Systems from CDC

[Michael Albaugh]

On 3/16/06, Richard Friedman <rchrd at rchrd.com> wrote:
>
> Now wait a min. If I remember, CTSS, which came out of Livermore and Los
> Alamos, had
> nothing to do with "CAL". I thought the "C" was for "computer" or
> "concurrent" or something
> simple like that. (Maybe Chippewa?)  Does it really say "CAL" in those
> manuals?


 CALTSS  is something very different from CTSS. I know nothing of Livermore
or Los Alamos,
but the CTSS that _I've_ heard of was the "Compatible Time Sharing System",
for
IBM 709..7094 systems.
 CALTSS is/was little known, perhaps because its "principal investigators"
left
fairly shortly after if came up, to start Berkeley Computer Corporation",
which,
IIRC, produced one machine which ended up at the University of Hawaii.
Some (many?) of them had been part of project Genie (SDS-930 conversion
to what became the XDS940), from which many artifacts survive to this day
(QED begat ed, which begat vi, edlin, vim, etc)

 And Calidoscope .. didn't that have to do something with Dave Cahlender
> (spelling may be off).
> Dave was the author of COMPASS, the CDC assembler (and what an assembler!)


 I totally agree that COMPASS was an amazing assembler. I used a set of
COMPASS
macros to form the "back end" of an integer-subset Algol 60 compiler, a
class
project. Today's macro-assemblers are a pale shadow... But my understanding
of CALIDOSCOPE was that the "CAL" part stood for University of California.
I may also have some of _those_ manuals around, but they are not in the
top strata. :-)

Didn't that eventually become KRONOS?


My recollection was that Kronos descended from MACE, but I wouldn't
bet money on it. I was pretty much out the door before Cal started running
Kronos "experimentally" on "The B machine" (the non-production machine
on which CAL-TSS, Kronos,  early versions of changes to CALIDOSCOPE,
etc. were run.)

Well, it was the 60's after all and the details are foggy.


 Age, or "what the 60's are known for"? :-)

    Mike
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.computerhistory.org/pipermail/inforoots/attachments/20060317/afb3c618/attachment.html