Computer History Museum 3778

Then there are the LOTS users from Stanford.

The Low Overhead Timesharing System had 3.5 FTE: The half-time Director, and the full-time System Manager, System Programmer, and administrative buttistant. There were (eventually) four part-time non-programmer student employees, two to coordinate course use of the systems with faculty and two to handle training and scheduling of the help-desk volunteers (called "consultants"). (All professional staff, including most especially the Director, spent an hour a week on the Help Desk.) From time to time there were paid student programmers on a project basis--programming the Ethernet TIPs, merging Stanford-local mods into new releases of Tops-20, etc.

The machine room was open to the public. It had to be: If you deleted your homework and needed to recover it from the nightly backup tapes, a consultant would show you where to find and how to read the backup file list, how to mount a tape and run DUMPER to recover your file(s), and where to put the tape away when you were done.

There was a list of phone numbers for every system manager and programmer at Stanford's 12 PDP-10 sites (all but three running Tops-20) on the name plate of the DEC-20s, in roughly priority order of who to call first if there were a system crash that did not come back up automagically. The student(s) who called those numbers were talked through the process of bringing the system back up, and professionals only came in if it were clear that the problem was too big for that. (NB: The same list, in different orders, was present on every PDP-10 on campus, but generally fewer people had physical access to other systems. :-)

(From 1976 when it started until 1984 when the last System Manager arrived, there were students and even graduated alumni with WHEEL bits on the LOTS systems, so that things could be fixed in a hurry when necessary. He was a security freak and removed everyone's wheel bits, then announced that anyone who thought they needed one was free to make a case to him as to why. LOTS was very different after that, but the way we operated the systems stayed the same.)

So I would contend that for the people who used LOTS, a static exhibit and a PC running SimH will *not* suffice to capture the experience for their kids. In fairness to the rest of the world, it won't suffice for them, either.

Note alternate .sig.

-- Rich Alderson "ASCII ribbon LOTS Tops-20 System Programmer, 1984-1991 x HTML mail and