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  #11  
Old June 27th 08, 08:00 PM posted to rec.photo.darkroom
John[_16_]
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Jean-David Beyer wrote:
John wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:

It was about that time that the BASIC OS-Language came out.

Misunderstanding. BASIC was never used as an operating system language.


We may be quibbling here. Basic was initial interface anyone got when
logging into the Dartmouth Time Sharing System and it was also the one they
programmed in. So from the user's viewpoint, it was both the operating
system and the programming language.


Yes, RSTS was the same way.

Another way of looking at your statement would be if you thought I meant a
language in which to write operating systems. I think it would be possible
to do it in BASIC, but I sure would not want to try it. I know ALGOL 60
compilers were written in ALGOL 60, even though it was by no means ideal to
do so.


Indeed, the ability of a language to compile itself is of questionable
value. It all compiles down to machine code of varying efficiency.

My favorite comments I saw in code included:

1.) Trickey

after some really obscure code. This was the only comment and it was not
funny to the person who had to maintain it.

and

2.) They made me do it.

After some stupid code; pretty clearly something the programmer did not want
to write, but a micromanaging supervisor forced it in.


Clever is dangerous. In class I wrote a one-line function that had my c
instructor wowed. It took him a while to figure out what it did, then he
said it was very clever. He even later offered me a job as a c
programmer. (brrr, a close call!)

I looked at the code ten years later and it was almost opaque to me.
When it becomes easier to understand the compiler-generated assembler of
the same, then you gotta know something is Way Bad(tm) about the higher
level code.

OB DARKROOM: Sometimes I feel the way about Photoshop outcomes.


  #12  
Old June 28th 08, 08:59 PM posted to rec.photo.darkroom
Geoffrey S. Mendelson
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Jean-David Beyer wrote:
Another way of looking at your statement would be if you thought I meant a
language in which to write operating systems. I think it would be possible
to do it in BASIC, but I sure would not want to try it. I know ALGOL 60
compilers were written in ALGOL 60, even though it was by no means ideal to
do so.


Not always. The Burroughs machines of that era (late 1960's) were true
stack processors and Algol suited them perferctly. The same with the HP
3000 computers of the early 1970's which also used some variant of Algol
as their "machine language".


Linux was first written in assembler for the PDP7
(and later the PDP11), and was converted to C in the early to mid 1970s.



UNIX not LINUX!!! Linux did not exist in any form until the early 1990's
and it started life as a terminal emulator.



Later Steve Johnson wrote the portable C compiler that made it practical to
port the UNIX OS from one kind of machine to another. I believe they ran it
on Interdata machines, and they for sure ran it on System/360 machines and
Amdahl machines. Of course now it will run on any machine that have the
right resources that people care enough to port it.


The first 360 operating system was TOS (tape operating system) and it
was written in BAL (assembly language), the same with OS/360 (PCP, MFT and
MVT), DOS/360, CP/67 and its CMS and ACP (Airline Control Program).

The 370 variants (DOS, DOS/VS, DOS/VSE from DOS), VM/370 and later VM/XA
(from CP/67), SVS (from OS/360 MFT) and MVS (from OS/360 MVT) and the 370
version of ACP were still written in BAL. I don't know about the others, but
MVS was 80% MVT code.

In 1980 so I was pretty familar with both MVS and VM source code,
having worked on additions to MVS's open/close/end of volume processing
and lots of work on VM (which was open source) from 1978 until the late
1980's.

MVS was "open source" in that you could with some legal agreement get a
copy of the assmebly listings on microfiche and JES (the part that handled
the printers/etc) was released in source code.

VM (and CMS) was released with source code and all fixes were provided as
source code. You had to apply the patches, reassemble and link the modules.
At some time (around 1987) IBM announced a vector processor for the 308x
series of computers and the modules that supported it were object code
only (closed source). It created quite a furor, although 99% of those
computers were not sold with one.

I don't think that UNIX (IBM called it AIX) was available for either the
360 or the 370 in that era, from what I remember it came after AIX for the
RISC 6000 which would place it in the 1990's.

Amdahl machines ran either MVS or VM/370. By that time SVS was gone and no
one ran DOS on "big iron" unless it was in a virtual machine under VM.

BTW, the predecessor to the HP 3000, the 2100 series had a DOS (disk
operating system) and a standalone BASIC timesharing system. Source code
was available for them. I used to have a binder with the source code
listings for the BASIC system and remember making patches and reassmebling
the DOS. This was the late 1960's-early 1970's.

I also remember wanting to try APL in the late 1960's and having only
access to a standard teletype and the aformentioned HP BASIC system,
writing an APL interpreter in basic. It was fine except that you had to
spell out each of those funny operators.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
  #13  
Old June 30th 08, 11:32 PM posted to rec.photo.darkroom
John[_16_]
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

Not always. The Burroughs machines of that era (late 1960's) were true
stack processors and Algol suited them perferctly.


I have one big thank you for the Burroughs machine - William S.
Burroughs. Rich enough all his life to be healthy in addiction.

I have one of his early published stories, "Junky" (under his pseudonym,
William Lee). A great scene where he rises from an intoxicated head
storm to scream in a man's face, "You are speaking to the Burroughs
Machine!". Ah, hell, it's a way to cope.
  #14  
Old July 1st 08, 01:49 AM posted to rec.photo.darkroom
Jean-David Beyer
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:
Another way of looking at your statement would be if you thought I meant a
language in which to write operating systems. I think it would be possible
to do it in BASIC, but I sure would not want to try it. I know ALGOL 60
compilers were written in ALGOL 60, even though it was by no means ideal to
do so.


Not always. The Burroughs machines of that era (late 1960's) were true
stack processors and Algol suited them perferctly. The same with the HP
3000 computers of the early 1970's which also used some variant of Algol
as their "machine language".

I taught a course in computer architecture where I worked and one of the
most interesting machines was the B5500 and its successors (and
predecessors, for that matter). I to not know what language their Algol-60
compiler was written in. What I thought ironic was that business users were
the biggest consumers of those Burroughs machines, and they tended to write
in COBOL in those days, which was by no means stack oriented.

The machine I used whose ALgol-60 compiler was written in Algol-60 was the
GE 635 and GE 645, which were not stack machines at all. The best Algol-60
compiler I know of was the Illinois Alcor compiler for the IBM 7090 series.
It was written in assembler, and was really a neat piece of code itself. It
compiled so fast it could be considered an "instantaneous" compiler in the
sense that if the input was from punched cards, it could compile something
like 10 cards per second and the card reader could read only about 150 cards
per minute, so it could compile as fast as it could read the input. It was
faster than our FORTRAN compiler, which I thought pretty good as FORTRAN was
meant to be easy to compile efficiently for a 704 type machine.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 20:40:01 up 5 days, 6:00, 4 users, load average: 3.12, 3.17, 3.21
  #15  
Old October 16th 08, 02:07 AM posted to rec.photo.darkroom
Frank Pittel
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
: Jean-David Beyer wrote:
: Another way of looking at your statement would be if you thought I meant a
: language in which to write operating systems. I think it would be possible
: to do it in BASIC, but I sure would not want to try it. I know ALGOL 60
: compilers were written in ALGOL 60, even though it was by no means ideal to
: do so.

: Not always. The Burroughs machines of that era (late 1960's) were true
: stack processors and Algol suited them perferctly. The same with the HP
: 3000 computers of the early 1970's which also used some variant of Algol
: as their "machine language".


: Linux was first written in assembler for the PDP7
: (and later the PDP11), and was converted to C in the early to mid 1970s.


: UNIX not LINUX!!! Linux did not exist in any form until the early 1990's
: and it started life as a terminal emulator.

That's interesting. I was always under the impression that Linux started life
as a unix clone.

--




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