this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
26 points (100.0% liked)
Free and Open Source Software
17957 readers
225 users here now
If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I had the chance to play with late 70s Unix for a bit a few years ago. (Hardware on loan from a museum.) VERY minimal, but still recognizable. (Well, my Unix reflexes are old - I started in the mid 80s.)
Interesting. About then I was using a VAX. Somehow I spend most of my time on other stuff until I switched to Linux around 2000.
My first Unix was 4.3BSD on a VAX-11/750. (There was another 11/750 running VMS, but I didn't like that nearly as much.)
Yes VMS. That was what I was using. Unix. I did use it for something a few times. The university had one of those mini-supper computers that were a thing for awhile.
Oooh - what mini super? Something weird, or just a small vector machine? That was an interesting niche...
Not really sure what it was. Maybe a small vector machine, or maybe a small cluster of them. I frankly do not remember much about it. Kind of forgotten about VMS until you reminded me. It was a time of much change in the 80s. I started on an IBM 370, then a departmental VAX, a Xerox Star System (a Word Processor on which the Mac was based), then we moved to Macs and Workstations. I had a Micro VAX I used, and Macs. All very expensive stuff. Personally I had a video terminal at at home at the start of the 80's, then a Commodore 64, then late 80's I bought a Mac at a huge price which I used until about 1997. There were some other systems kicking around during that time too that are hard to remember. One was something from Honeywell at a company I worked for during summers.
Actually fun reminiscing a little. Have not thought about this stuff in decades. One thing I always though was kind of fun. When I started collage terminals were just coming in for students and there was not enough of them. Huge lines. Me I would go over to the row of empty card punches and punch up a deck for my assignment, walk over the the window and give it to the operator and have it read. Then I would get in line for a terminal which by then was often shorter, login, do any editing and debugging, and run and print my assignment in like 30 minutes. Not sure why others did not do this. Just seemed like the way to go.