Documenting how old computers were used

From: Paul Williams <flo_at_rdel.co.uk>
Date: Tue May 30 06:13:01 2000

John Honniball wrote:
>
> On Fri, 26 May 2000 13:57:31 -0400 Douglas Quebbeman
> <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com> wrote:
> > I'm glad you posted this. I'm effecting a rescue of a Prime 2455
> > system, which I should receive in a week.
> ...
> > Any other Pr1me fans hanging out here???
>
> Yes! I used a Prime P750 back at Westfield College,
> London, 1981-1985. We used it to run the Georgia Tech
> Software Tools Subsystem, and to do remote job entry for
> undergraduate programming assignments in Algol-68.

I did a year's sandwich at UKAEA Culham Labs, Oxon. from 1987-88 and
used a bunch of Primes there. I thought they were fascinating machines.
They had recently upgraded to Primos Rev.19. I was told at the time that
even numbers and odd numbered revisions were for different purposes --
anyone know what the difference was? I know that a big part of the
change to Rev.19 was dynamic linking of libraries, so I was involved
with recompiling loads of utilities to go from using SEG (static linker)
to BIND (dynamic).

I liked CPL, Prime's shell language, but most users of the computing
services used UKAEA's own shell, GPL(?), which had been implemented on
Primes, VAXen and an IBM 3084 at Harwell. This gave a common ground to
physicists who had to use many different machines. One common scenario
was develop a program on the Primes, transfer it through the IBM to the
Cray 2 at Harwell, run it, and transfer the results back to the Prime
for printing out.

At the time I was there, many physicists were moving away from this
complicated system and getting more power on their desktops. There were
a lot of Whitechapel MG-1 workstations around the place, and Suns were
starting to appear. Whitechapel came along to demo their latest and
greatest colour workstations, running a windowing system which I think
was called Oriel.
Received on Tue May 30 2000 - 06:13:01 BST