I've always considered myself lucky that one of first minicomputers I got to know and love was a DG Eclipse. I had the experience of reading the book in college

I've always considered myself lucky that one of first minicomputers I got to know and love was a DG Eclipse. I had the experience of reading the book in college and learning the weird, wonderful, and amazing AOS/VS operating system at the same time. In the late 1980s I got to learn a ton about an operating system that had threads (tasks), virtual memory, shared memory, rich filesystem ACLs, symbolic links, and a bizarre shell language that forced you to do all your looping via recursion. I learned how to program in C on that machine, I wrote some of my first assembly on that machine, and I spent hours pouring over thick black three-ring binders filled with manuals on OS usage, system calls, and the hardware architecture. Friends and I competed to learn arcane details on how the system worked. My main claim to fame was I figured out how to share memory between unrelated processes, and how to use the atomic-test-and-set instruction to safely synchronize access to it. One time while we were studying the virtual memory system, a friend wrote a program to see what would happen if you allocated the entire 4G address space of virtual memory and then randomly touched different pages of it. Predictably, the storm of page faults ground the machine to a standstill, causing our lazy sysadmin to have to put down his his copy of Datamation and address the gathering throng outside his door. I have this recurring dream that I'm back at college for some event, and I wander into the Computer Center and look around. In the very back, there is a dusty 'Dasher' D210 terminal next to some stacked up old furniture -- plugged in and emitting a dim green glow. It's hooked up to our MV/10000 Eclipse, which I imagine is still in the basement of the Library Building humming along after all these years. I try to log in, but I can't remember any of my old accounts and passwords.