Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ulysses!andante!alice!dmr From: dmr@alice.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: GCOS field Message-ID: <8472@alice.UUCP> Date: 2 Dec 88 10:14:37 GMT Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ Lines: 34 A couple of brief historical notes-- GCOS used to be GECOS and was GE's, and is now Honeywell's system. Xerox wasn't involved. The field in the password file originally contained a G[E]COS login name and account number and was used when jobs were sent to that system from Unix. Mostly these jobs printed things on a line printer, definitely not a typesetter. We were the ones who had that (and didn't have a fast printer). B was done on the PDP-7 in an interpretive implementation. On the -7, I wrote a cross-compiler for it to the Honeywell-- actually still GE at that time. This was a peculiar sort of tour-de-force, since it worked in 4K words of memory. The interpreter had a software paging mechanism, so the virtual space was larger. Later, in the early '70s, Steve Johnson spent a year at Waterloo and took the B compiler with him. It became popular there, and even had some offshoots-- Eh and Zed. Incidentally, Steve brought back some interesting perceptions about change. Previously, Waterloo had become well-known for WATFOR, a quick, student-oriented version of Fortran that ran on IBM systems. A little later, Morven Gentleman moved (from BTL) to Waterloo and brought in Honeywell equipment, mainly because of its superior (among then available commercial systems) interactive computing. This was a sort of revolution that rousted the batch WATFOR hegemony, and B flourished. Not too much later, Unix came in, and there was another revolution. Dennis Ritchie