From: Al Kossow Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2017 9:04 AM > On 10/25/17 11:55 AM, Rich Alderson via cctalk wrote:
>> Noel, do have a reference for "some commercial time-sharing system in the >> Boston area"? From Paul Allen's autobiography, the Harvard system was >> followed immediately by their move to Albuquerque, where they leased time on >> the local school board's PDP-10, and that's what my friends who worked for >> Micro-soft back then have told me, as well. > Harvard had an SDS 940, which shipped with a version of Berkeley's > timesharing system. Tymshare's version of that system was significantly > improved, and included "Super BASIC". SDS's OS was replaced with Tymshare's > at Harvard because the original was so bad, and so they were exposed to that > version of BASIC. PA told me that was the influence for M-S's BASIC > extensions. Harvard also had a KA-10, which is what PGA's 8008 -> 8080 simulator ran on, using the User UUO capabilities of the architecture and operating system: Microprocessor 8-bit byte in the address field, and a user-defined operation in the opcode field to do the interpretation/call the interpreter. (The simulator was originally written for the Traf-O-Data device, which was 8008 based.) I put the code on our Tops-10 system while he was writing the book, and the version of BASIC we run on the Altair 8800 in the Exhibit Hall was compiled on that system; it is not a Microsoft product. I know about the influence of SuperBASIC; I did not know about the Harvard 940. Thanks for the note! Rich Rich Alderson Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer Living Computers: Museum + Labs 2245 1st Avenue S Seattle, WA 98134 mailto:ri...@livingcomputers.org http://www.LivingComputers.org/