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On Sun, 29 May 2011, Simon Waters wrote:
On 29/05/11 14:29, Gordon Henderson wrote:As for primes.. Ugh. Used them at uny. Horrible things and a stupidly controlling computer services department who looked after them too.By 1986 (I think revision 19 of the OS) the rough edges must have been hewn off. Lovely command syntax, and a computer services department who turned a blind eye (I suspect, since we weren't that discrete) to us attempting to run bulletin boards outside the accounting system using this here new fangled posix subsystem.
I started on 17, but by the time I was working for the uny (sort of post grad stuff) they got 19. Our department (Mech & Ind Eng) actually had their own prime to do cad/cam with but the comp. services *had* to run & admin it, applying their usual policys to it...
I did play with Primix a few times, but by then I had a lab full of BBC Masters & econet, and was using Apolo worksations for cad/cam and cared little for the Primes anymore.
The only information about Primes the Computer Services people ever gave me was a lecture about how the guy had implemented key press detection (we take these things so much for granted) in Primos.
I did lots of boring stuff when studying the uny was an olde-schoole commerce place, so still stuck in the olden days of FORTRAN and COBOL programming. I did some stuff in PMA (Prime Macro Assembler) because I could and it took the edge of the boredome of COBOL... (Then again, wished I'd stuck with cobol and made my fortune in y2k... but maybe not)
They always seemed grossly underpowered - but then they were facing the next. gen of school leavers who'd had acces to Apples & PETs at school - they had batch processing and waiting a day for a compile and run wasn't unusual )-: I'd go & play with the PDP11 that the comp. sci department had, and do nice stuff in C on glass TTYs rather than try to correct the errors (on a TTY33) that the comp. services made when entering your hand-written coding forms...
Them were the days... And oddly enough I really don't yearn for them.... Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq