Paul Gilmartin asked: >That rift appears to parallel the ASCII-EBCDIC divide. What was the >first ASCII OS on IBM (or clone) mainframe hardware?
Good question. MUMPS? MUSIC? PICK? I don't know whether any of those were ASCII, suspect not. If I had to guess, Linux might be the first: until then, you'd be presumably developing the OS under VM (or, God forbid, MVS) so ASCII would have seemed harder. I suggested MUMPS because it *was* multi-platform, started on a PDP-7, so has a higher chance of having been ASCII, but still doubt it. I almost took a job in 1993 or so to be the lead architect at Micronetics for MUMPS/VM, but ultimately decided the commute from Northern Virginia to Maryland would be too much. In retrospect, I'm probably glad I declined: MUMPS/VM died in 1995--and I'm not arrogant enough to think I would have been the difference between its life and death! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
