11–20 of 54 posts
For those wondering what ITS is. It's an operating system that was developed at MIT for the PDP-6 and later PDP-10 starting in the mid 60s. The last ITS system was shut down in 1990. A very cool thing about ITS is that DDT, the debugger, is the user interface to the OS. You can load files, examine and change memory of your current job (and also DDT itself!), and of course also start programs. ITS is also where EMACS…
Makes ed look almost benign...
What are/were the unique or distinctive features of ITS? It's mentioned in a couple of places in the "jargon file", but otherwise it's a part of computing history I'm not familiar with.
The "PCLSRing" technique to essentially back out of an active syscall is worth studying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLSRing http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/pclsr.htm . It's much better than the UNIX approach of returning early with an error or incomplete data.
It runs Emacs, therefore it's useful.
ITS was an early operating system that could handle multiple users logged onto the same machine at the same time -- think of how multiple people can SSH into the same Linux machine. It came out of MIT's AI lab which is where a lot of early hackers were doing their thing. Here's an excerpt from Stephen Levy's book Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. It is a great read and I highly recommend it: "It underlined…
What are/were the unique or distinctive features of ITS? It's mentioned in a couple of places in the "jargon file", but otherwise it's a part of computing history I'm not familiar with.
The "PCLSRing" technique to essentially back out of an active syscall is worth studying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLSRing http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/pclsr.htm . It's much better than the UNIX approach of returning early with an error or incomplete data.
Might be wrong though, so don't quote me.
For those wondering what ITS is. It's an operating system that was developed at MIT for the PDP-6 and later PDP-10 starting in the mid 60s. The last ITS system was shut down in 1990. A very cool thing about ITS is that DDT, the debugger, is the user interface to the OS. You can load files, examine and change memory of your current job (and also DDT itself!), and of course also start programs. ITS is also where EMACS…
> the TECO editor (a crazy beast). Makes ed look almost benign... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TECO_%28text_editor%29
Also, if you're interested in fiddling with ITS, and weren't around in The Good Old Days (as I was not), Björn Victor's ITS wiki (http://its.victor.se/wiki/) is an invaluable resource.
ITS was an early operating system that could handle multiple users logged onto the same machine at the same time -- think of how multiple people can SSH into the same Linux machine. It came out of MIT's AI lab which is where a lot of early hackers were doing their thing. Here's an excerpt from Stephen Levy's book Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution. It is a great read and I highly recommend it: "It underlined…
Now i am curious to get hold of some DEC terminals and see how many i can hook up to a desktop computer once i stuff it with serial port cards.
You can add dozens and dozens of ports that way, for cheap!
What are/were the unique or distinctive features of ITS? It's mentioned in a couple of places in the "jargon file", but otherwise it's a part of computing history I'm not familiar with.
The "PCLSRing" technique to essentially back out of an active syscall is worth studying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLSRing http://fare.tunes.org/tmp/emergent/pclsr.htm . It's much better than the UNIX approach of returning early with an error or incomplete data.