Hey gang, a few months ago I presented about timeshare and some aspects about operating systems since the 1950s.
To buzz through a PDF or PPT version of the notes: https://github.com/voidstar78/VCF2026 VCFSW has the talk archived here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hE235ti9XQ Sorry being a bit dull as a speaker, but a few highlights: - overview of Douglass Ross "Director Tape" for Whirlwind (only "what it looked like" evidence that I was ever able to find, would be curious if others knew more about it) - 1965 Honeywell ADMIRAL OS: while I couldn't find much info about that specific OS, what I did find what Honeywell went to bat for us all vs RAND corp, putting an end some concerns about ENIAC hardware patents (that's a very short version of it) - today we fight about \ vs / slashes, when MULTICS split the difference and used > (greater than symbol), at least as far as I could tell from the manuals - some verification that UNIX was (sort of) originally called UNICS (see footnotes in the PPT notes), never formally written down but "verified" in the past year - I made a claim that Datapoint CTOS (1972) was the only OS ever on a cassette tape (not to be confused with the late 1970s CTOS) - that said, I suppose the MCM/70 did as well; really admires Mattis Lind's work on the DP2200 I never found too much info about "tymshare" (apparently a late 1960s kind of "corporate or business-to-business digital exchange" system, maybe for inventory or check-processing?). Tons of other OS's, obviously couldn't cover them all in a VCF talk. But there are a bunch of addendum notes after the end of the slides: - Mike Muuss ENIAC archive (at a .mil ftp if anyone wants to archive it more properly?) - I still claim that the word "operating system" was never used before 1960; the "SOS" or "share OS" was a name applied later (1962ish) to those pre-1960s concepts [ afaik ] - I couldn't fit in a bit about squozed :) really wanted to, just couldn't make it fit - AOSP, EXEC II, IBM 1800 derivatives (anyone ever see one of these in the wild?), Oh, not officially launched yet, but I'm now self hosting oldsayings.info (with a telnet front-end at port 42525). Kicking around some ideas, but it's reliably staying up now with Starlink as the ISP. I got tired of waiting for fiber - but the county workers are getting closer, I see them running it ranch by ranch. Cheers, wish could have made it to VCF West this year. -Steve
