[Simh] RT-11 source

[Bob Eager]

On Thu, 27 Oct 2016 01:21:44 +0200
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> On 2016-10-26 21:14, Paul Koning wrote:
> >  
> >> On Oct 23, 2016, at 4:11 PM, Bob Eager <rde at tavi.co.uk> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 14:07:33 -0400
> >> Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> >>  
> >>> ...  
> >>  
> >>> RT-11 is very clean.  I've worked with V2A (the FB version when
> >>> possible, SJ when I didn't have enough memory).  They are very
> >>> simple and compact; the UI is the old TOPS-10 style, not the
> >>> newer bloated "DCL" interface.  So a V2 era edition would be a
> >>> good way to go.  
> >>
> >> Yes, it's very nice. Someone once gave me electronic copies of some
> >> sources (circa 1975) and I read them with glee. Lovely comments,
> >> too: the system call dispatcher had the comment "What's it going
> >> to be then, eh?" from the Clockwork Orange. I think those comments
> >> were only in the FB monitor.  
> >
> > Yes.  They were the work of the FB designer, Anton Chernoff, later
> > my mentor in college.  I lifted the idea later on; some of the
> > DECnet/E source code has neat quotes in it.  Unfortunately, those
> > aren't so visible because DECnet/E sources were never
> > distributed... :-(  
> 
> That practice were clearly also around in the software for the PDP-8.
> I remember quite some enjoyment reading about the financial state of
> the Pony Express in the mid 19th century in the FORTRAN-IV runtime
> system.

It prompted me to do the same, particularly in some terminal software I
wrote part of around that time. The commands could be abbreviated as
long as they stayed unique, modelled on my experience of TOPS-10 a bit
earlier.

(the software was called YAROE - Yet Another Rewrite Of Everything)