Hi Paul,
Thanks for that! I'd mentioned this over on Facebook, where I'd also been
able to post a photo of the transcript, and someone there pointed out that
the BASIC listing uses single quotes around strings (what I'd expect to be
ASCII 27h) rather than the double quotes that BASIC typically uses
(expected ASCII 22h).
Is that at all "meaningful" in any way? Did CDC BASIC use (or at least
allow) single quotes instead of double? Or was the teletype maybe
configured to print a single quote when encountering ASCII 22h, normally a
double? Obviously I don't know why anyone would actually want that behavior.
The only other thing I can think of is that the listing I have is a "fake"
- i.e. not a true dump of a program run at all, but something that someone
typed by hand, and they used the wrong quotes. That's a surprising error if
so, but if this was educational material I suppose it's possible that it
was simply a text file containing the listing followed by the supposed
output, subsequently dumped to a teletype.
Jules
On 4/26/22 09:24, Paul Koning wrote:
Apparently so. The word from a CDC experts list is that the "run complete"
message is not from BASIC itself (which is indeed a CDC product) but rather from the time
sharing executive, called TELEX in KRONOS and early NOS, and IAF in later versions of NOS.
As for the slashed letter O, that's strange. Certainly it is not CDC practice;
the only place I ever ran into this is with IBM, I always considered it an
example of IBM doing things the weird way. So it sounds like whoever bought
those Teletype machines had them configured in that non-standard way for some
reason. Normal, as far as I know, was slashed digit zero.
MECC is a U. Minnesota KRONOS/NOS system with a bunch of local mods, but BASIC
and TELEX are both part of the base system as supplied by CDC.
paul
On Apr 26, 2022, at 3:05 AM, Raymond Wiker via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Kronos
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_Kronos>, perhaps?
On 26 Apr 2022, at 03:08, Jules Richardson via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Perhaps a long shot, but I've got an old piece of paper here showing a BASIC listing
followed by a program run where the BASIC environment terminates with "run
complete" - does that behavior ring any bells with anyone? I'm mildly curious what
machine it may have come from.
The other interesting thing is that the output is from a teletype and the zero
characters appear with no slash, while the uppercase 'O' characters do have a
diagonal slash through them (e.g. the 'run complete' mentioned above comes out
as 'RUN C0MPLETE') - certainly not unheard of, but I think doing the opposite
had become typical practice by what, very early 1970s?
At the top of the page there is a paragraph as follows (all in uppercase on the
printout, obviously, and with slashed 'O' characters):
"The following output is an example of BASIC language and the resulting run of a
program. A punched paper tape of the program is included in the kit. This output was
produced on a teletype."
I don't know if that means anything to anyone? I have no idea what "the kit"
was but am guessing that the printout I have was once part of some kind of educational
material.
I do have another printout from the MECC timeshare system (dated 78/9/1) which
may have originated with the same teletype - it's different paper stock, but
has the same slashed 'O' characters. The welcome message on that says 'Kronos
2.12-439', if that's meaningful...
cheers
Jules
