> A little bit of effort has even enabled me to recall the author of - nearly > all - of the 4K DOS spooling package, one Jim Shields, Mr. DOS in the > Wigmore Street IBM UK Field Systems Centre around 1968.
I believe I remember him. He could almost make DOS DITTO talk. One of the things he knew was the contents of every register when the programme was entered. Apparently at one time IBM had considered making all of them a supported interface. He also taught me DITTO control cards - which I didn't know existed before. In fact, I don't think I even knew DITTO existed before. We were an OS shop tabulating lots of cards (30m a month and growing fast) using a couple of 1401s and writing them to tape for processing. But they couldn't keep up with our growth and we had to find a way of reading them (if possible) once each instead of the four times we did it with the 1401. Four of us wrote 250,000 lines in seven months. I think Jim was the guy IBM sent in for a couple of weeks to teach us the nuances of DOS. We were already pretty sharp with Assembler F, so it wasn't too hard. Most of it was how to design and build overlay structures - our 360/25 wasn't very big. When we first cobbled it together it was too slow, and we kept missing the clutch cycle on the 2540. I remember the first day we hit it right and a box of cards disappeared into the hopper in around a minute. It would be fun to try something like that today - being able to view other people's source online from the other side of the world. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
