[Simh] RT-11 source

Rich Alderson simh at alderson.users.panix.com
Wed Oct 26 15:06:13 EDT 2016


> From: Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se>
> Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2016 03:11:05 +0200

> In fact, I would probably suggest Ray start with just writing some code 
> to do some simple things without looking at existing code. The first 
> thing needed would be to just have something that can load programs from 
> a device, and run them. This will require some simple device driver, 
> some simple file system, and a simple command line interpreter.
       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

That's not even needed.  Beyond a 44 character file id in the VTOC on a disk,
none of the IBM batch operating systems for the System/360 has what we would
call a file system.  OS/360 requires the programmer to know how much space a
file might occupy in its lifetime and allocate that (including overflow areas);
DOS/360 requires the programmer to do all of that, *AND IN ADDITION* to define
the exact location of the file on disk.  I don't think anyone would argue that
those operating systems were unsuccessful in the marketplace.

Just sayin'.

                                                                Rich


More information about the Simh mailing list