winscape 2235

Choosing any timesharing OS would probably be a bad idea for first exposure. Things get complicated quickly when you start dealing with more than one processfor want of a better noun.

I'm thinking of the basic ABCs of OS code. Sure things get more complicated. poo, comm put us up a tree for a long time.

I would expect this from any OS. Why do you buttume TOPS10 and other OSes did not provide direct physical I-O? We were selling gear to engineers and scientists; offering this feature was a requirement.

Any instrumentation could not wait for an OS to do the work. AFAIK all recording was direct I-O. Then comm got fast enough and bandwidth capacity got broad enough to ship information captured in realtime down a wire.

Then is is an OS. Parse the term operating system. First think about the word operating; now think about the word system. The fact that you install MS-DOS on your disk implies that you are going to use it as an OS. IOW, you expect it to provide certain computing services.

How closely did you look at them? Did you walk into a room and get told that is a foobar OS? Or did you execute each instruction one at time? If you are basing your comments on 1962 timeframes, then you have no idea what I'm talking about. OSes were not doing swapping to fit more than job back then. They were doing stuff like shuffling. The biz was just beginning to learn about relocatable code that did addressing with offsets.

Huh? This makes no sense. Or are we talking across my DEC chasm created by how we did the work? There isn't any way we would allow a spec to keep us from coding the best error recovery code within the context of the OS' definition. By this I mean TOPS-10's primary objective was to deliver general timesharing computing services.

We must be talking about different things because none of us would let a spec keep us from doing error recovery. Scan DEC's documentations. Look for the words printed in usually blue or red. Those are extensions to the standards specifications. It took a very long time for e.g. FORTRAN standards to make I-O statements generic. A unit number 5 meant cards and bybitgods it would be a physical card reader. DEC extended that such that a user could buttIGN DSK 5 or buttIGN DSK CDR and use a data file from disk rather than stand in line waiting of a unit device to be available.

Like I stated above, TOPS-10's primary objective was to provide general timesharing. That meant that "Thou shalt have a way to avoid standing in line to get access to the gear and computing power."

BAH