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Things to add: Wirth's Oberon hardware and software a small but successful bit of software that was ported to many other architectures and the language remains

Things to add: Wirth's Oberon hardware and software a small but successful bit of software that was ported to many other architectures and the language remains influential. Also Apollo's DomainOS which had network transparency in the early 1990s

eschaton 3y ago
Domain/OS was the final name of the system, it was originally called Aegis and had network transparency in the early 1980s.
DonHopkins 3y ago
ITS (which Richard Gabriel discussed in his "Worse is Better" paper in relation to the "PC-loser-ing" problem in particular, and the "better" MIT school of design in general) had a network transparent file system in the 70's! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste... https://www.techopedia.com/definition/26097/incompatible-timesharing-system-its https://www.techopedia.com/definition/26097/incompatible-tim... Techopedia Explains Incompatible Timesharing System [...] The ITS OS was developed in late 1960s and continued to be used up to 1990 at MIT, and until 1995 at the Stacken Computer Club in Sweden. Some of the important technical features of ITS are as follows: The operating system contained the first device-independent graphics terminal output. The screen content was controlled using generic commands created by a program. The content was usually translated into a sequence of device-dependent characters defined by the terminal the programmer was using. Virtual devices were supported in software run in user processes called jobs. It provided inter-machine file system access and was the first OS to include this feature. It provided a sophisticated process management in which the processes were organized in a tree. Any process could be transparently frozen or restarted at any point in time. A highly advanced software interrupt facility was provided, which could operate asynchronously. It supported real-time and time-sharing operations, which worked simultaneously. [...] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/worse-is-better.html#:~:text=The%20PC%20loser%2Ding%20problem%20occurs%20when%20a%20user%20program,user%20program%20must%20be%20saved https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/wor.... [...] Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The right thing is to back out and restore the user program PC to the instruction that invoked the system routine so that resumption of the user program after the interrupt, for example, re-enters the system routine. It is called ``PC loser-ing'' because the PC is being coerced into ``loser mode,'' where ``loser'' is the affectionate name for ``user'' at MIT. [...]
- p_l 3y ago
  Reading some docs from MIT during that era, one can notice instructions that required use of multiple different machines, and how pervasive transparent network filesystem access was involved in that. For example, to build a dial-in server using cheap PDP-11, essentially a way for mid-1980s students to connect a bunch of random PCs they might have to MIT's network, involved building code using at least PDP-10 and Lisp Machines - PDP-10 to run PDP-11 assembler and linker, and then Lisp Machine because several of them had permanently attached EEPROM programmers. The burned EEPROM would then be used as ROM for a common cheap PDP-11 cpu board combined with Interlan Ethernet board, and the ROM would download the remaining OS code over network. https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/mits_s https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/mits_s

eschaton 3y ago

Domain/OS was the final name of the system, it was originally called Aegis and had network transparency in the early 1980s.

DonHopkins 3y ago

ITS (which Richard Gabriel discussed in his "Worse is Better" paper in relation to the "PC-loser-ing" problem in particular, and the "better" MIT school of design in general) had a network transparent file system in the 70's! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incompatible_Timesharing_Syste... https://www.techopedia.com/definition/26097/incompatible-timesharing-system-its https://www.techopedia.com/definition/26097/incompatible-tim... Techopedia Explains Incompatible Timesharing System [...] The ITS OS was developed in late 1960s and continued to be used up to 1990 at MIT, and until 1995 at the Stacken Computer Club in Sweden. Some of the important technical features of ITS are as follows: The operating system contained the first device-independent graphics terminal output. The screen content was controlled using generic commands created by a program. The content was usually translated into a sequence of device-dependent characters defined by the terminal the programmer was using. Virtual devices were supported in software run in user processes called jobs. It provided inter-machine file system access and was the first OS to include this feature. It provided a sophisticated process management in which the processes were organized in a tree. Any process could be transparently frozen or restarted at any point in time. A highly advanced software interrupt facility was provided, which could operate asynchronously. It supported real-time and time-sharing operations, which worked simultaneously. [...] https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/worse-is-better.html#:~:text=The%20PC%20loser%2Ding%20problem%20occurs%20when%20a%20user%20program,user%20program%20must%20be%20saved https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs240/old/sp2014/readings/wor.... [...] Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The right thing is to back out and restore the user program PC to the instruction that invoked the system routine so that resumption of the user program after the interrupt, for example, re-enters the system routine. It is called ``PC loser-ing'' because the PC is being coerced into ``loser mode,'' where ``loser'' is the affectionate name for ``user'' at MIT. [...]

p_l 3y ago
Reading some docs from MIT during that era, one can notice instructions that required use of multiple different machines, and how pervasive transparent network filesystem access was involved in that. For example, to build a dial-in server using cheap PDP-11, essentially a way for mid-1980s students to connect a bunch of random PCs they might have to MIT's network, involved building code using at least PDP-10 and Lisp Machines - PDP-10 to run PDP-11 assembler and linker, and then Lisp Machine because several of them had permanently attached EEPROM programmers. The burned EEPROM would then be used as ROM for a common cheap PDP-11 cpu board combined with Interlan Ethernet board, and the ROM would download the remaining OS code over network. https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/mits_s https://github.com/PDP-10/its/tree/master/src/mits_s