Re: System UICs

On 11 Jun 2024 21:01:50 -0400, Rich Alderson wrote:

If you ever encountered a CompuServe ID, you were looking at a Tops-10
PPN in a different syntax.

It just clicked with me that CompuServe were using a lot of TOPS-10
machines, and that was well into the 1980s.

RSX-15 was the original;  RSX-11 was a reimplementation on the 16-bit
hardware.

That I never knew.

A separation of terminology indicating some kind of cultural
separation within DEC itself?

>
Since each product line was a separate culture, by design, that's
hardly surprising.

Still, it has to be said, DEC’s product lines were never quite as
fragmented as, say, IBM’s.

Consider that IBM is credited with inventing “virtual machines”, but this
wasn’t some elegant resource-management technology, it was just a big
hack, initially to offer timeshared multi-user service for an OS (CMS)
that was interactive, but only single-user.

Whereas on the PDP-11, DEC created RSTS/E, which somehow managed to
directly run a subset of binaries from RT-11 and RSX-11, in addition to
its own native ones.