TOPS-20

From: Huw Davies <H.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au>
Date: Tue Oct 20 01:37:13 1998

At 04:00 PM 20-10-98 -0400, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:

> -spc (Has anyone here actually used TOPS-20?)

No, but I spent eight years or so using TOPS-10. I did a fair amount of
programming on it using various programming languages (Macro, FORTRAN,
Pascal, Algol, Algol-68, Simula-67, Bliss-10, BCPL, Focal, etc. etc.)
although I spent most time in the Bliss, BCPL and Macro area.

I guess by the end of it all I'd consider myself a sophisticated
non-privileged systems programmer (I wasn't on the Computer Centre staff)
but did help with special monitor builds from time to time.

I think there's a large bit of nostalgia in my love of TOPS-10 and related
things. I'm not sure I'd want to go back to spending my days in front of a
VT05 at 2400 baud. It's nice to have multiple windows, graphics, music etc!
I do miss the programming languages though. You just can't seem to get the
same mix for Digital Unix (at least not free anyway....).

One of the things that made life so much easier as a programmer was a
package called IOLIB which was written by one of the systems staff here at
La Trobe (a guy named Rob Cook). It added a run-time library and a large
number of macros to make assembly language programming easier. In many ways
it covered up the difficulty of not having a "standard" I/O library,
something that was addressed with TOPS-10 and the JSYS UUO. I'm not clear
on this, can someone confirm that JSYS was a UUO - I remember reading about
this in the mid-70s and as it was a -20ism, never got to play with it!


 Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies_at_latrobe.edu.au
 Information Technology Services | Phone: +61 3 9479 1550 Fax: +61 3 9479 1999
 La Trobe University | "If God had wanted soccer played in the
 Melbourne Australia 3083 | air, the sky would be painted green"
Received on Tue Oct 20 1998 - 01:37:13 BST