Re: The joy of FORTRAN

["Followup-To:" header set to alt.folklore.computers.]
On 2024-09-25, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 16:05:25 -1000, Lynn Wheeler wrote:
>

... some of the MIT CTSS/7094 went to Project MAC on the 5th flr to do
MULTICS ...

>
Let’s see ... “CTSS” (Corbatò et al) stood for “Compatible Time Sharing
System”, the “Compatible” part meant that it could not interfere with
batch workloads run under the IBM-proprietary OS on the same hardware.
>
Later some hackers at MIT created their own OS for the PDP-10 and named it
“Incompatible Timesharing System” (ITS) as a sort of anti-homage to
CTSS. ;)
>
(You thought “MULTICS”/“UNICS” (later “UNIX”) was the only pun of its type
to come out of the ferment of OS development in the 1960s?)

The magic of Lisp and ITS is that if you know how to use Emacs and a bit
of Elisp, you can be using Maclisp in no time.

Ditto with current Maxima on top of Common Lisp vs Macsyma. The syntax
it's 100% the same, just diferring on the available functions.
But for common plots and equations, if you do a plot in Macsyma,
Maxima will plot the same exact thing but with Gnuplot instead of
an special printer file for the PDP10. Altough you can perfectly
dump the file to a virtual tape and process it to PostScript
with modern ITS+Simh emulation tools.