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Comment by Isamu | Hacker News Reader

Oh my glob, I remember doing SYSGEN on RSX-11M+. Haven't thought about that since ... probably since I did it (a few times, don't recall the problem I was having.)

Anybody here remember working on TOPS-20 on a DEC-20? And all the crashes when it was in heavy use late in the evening before some big assignments were due ...

All the DECWriters in the room would simultaneously clatter out "%DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING", there would be shocked silence for 2 seconds, then all the cries of anguish as everyone realized they hadn't saved the last few hours of work.

Good times.

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"Anybody here remember working on TOPS-20 on a DEC-20?"

Yes, I did a lot of work on DEC-20s in grad school. It was the first machine I used that was connected to ARPANET (precursor to today's internet).

I also spent lots of time on a PDP-11/45, although it was running Unix (Version 7 from Bell Labs), not RSX-11. That machine had the old-style console with a toggle switch for each bit:

http://devilanse.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/6a00c22525688b8...

To boot it, you'd have to toggle in the address of the boot ROM into the instruction address register.

Oh, yes, sysadmin'd several DEC-20's, some at the Columbia University computing center, some at the MIT-EECS department (working for Joel Moses) (though the homegrown LISPMs were a lot more fun) and some at the Fairchild AI Labs (a startup for Schlumberger under the Fairchild umbrella in Palo Alto, populated by the principal ex-SRI AI folks, where the Symbolics LISPMs eventually took over).

And, yes, lots of happy memories, especially for the poor students when all the CRTs would send out their chorus of feeps and simultaneous %DECSYSTEM-20 NOT RUNNING messages (as sent by the PDP-11 front end).

That effect was most pronounced at one of the huge Stanford terminal rooms (where, luckily my buddies (Ralph Gorin, Marc Crispin (of later IMAP fame), JQ Johnson, anyone?) were the sysadmins, and not I ;-).

We used TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 at USAF Systems Command in the early 1980s. Good times...

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