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Incredibly odd system which had no assembler. Almost a pure stack machine, some models had a 51 bit word (48 bit and a 3 bit tag). One of the first machines with NUMA & SMP, segmented memory, and virtual memory (but with all the oddness of a first innovator).

I knew some of the engineers at Unisys who were still supporting Clearpath and Libra. Even they thought Burroughs was weird...

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Assembler was possible in both ESPOL and NEWP, there was a way to load the initial stack at boot time to get things in place. But it was only a few instructions worth. There was actually a patch to the Algol compiler from UC Davis that let you put any instruction in place. I used that to create named pipes for applications to use.

There was interesting procedure names in the Master Control Program (yes, Tron fans, the real MCP) JEDGARHOOVER was central to system level security. I taught the customer facing MCP class for a few years.

In the early days they gave you the source code and it wasn't uncommon for people to make patches and share them around. Everyone sent patches into the plant and in a release or two you would see them come back as official code.

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