Article: 1102 of comp.sys.cdc From: "Mark Riordan" Newsgroups: comp.sys.cdc Subject: Seymour Cray vs. software in CDC's early days Lines: 46 X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 Message-ID: <_8Tyb.891$Oe5.548@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net> Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 02:53:46 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 68.78.235.178 X-Complaints-To: abuse@earthlink.net X-Trace: newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net 1070333626 68.78.235.178 (Mon, 01 Dec 2003 21:53:46 EST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2003 21:53:46 EST Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Path: news.meer.net!sea-read.news.verio.net!dfw-artgen!dfw-peer!news.verio.net!newsfeed1.easynews.com!easynews.com!easynews!elnk-pas-nf1!newsfeed.earthlink.net!stamper.news.pas.earthlink.net!stamper.news.atl.earthlink.net!newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net.POSTED!9d803fbe!not-for-mail Xref: archive.mv.meer.net comp.sys.cdc:1102 I came across this account of programming at CDC in the early days in the December 2003 issue of Unisys World. (I feel like a traitor, having turned my back on CDC and now working with computers from its former competitor.) The article, by Gerry Del Fiacco of Unisys, is primarily about a proprietary Unisys database named MAPPER, but it curiously contains these paragraphs: ---------------------------------------------------- I entered the computer industry in 1965 after matriculating in the comfortable environs of graduate school at the University of Minnesota. My first job in industry was with Control Data Corporation working on a project headed by the legendary Seymour Cray. He had a team of hardware engineers sequestered in an engineering lab on his own property in Chippewa Falls, Wisc. At that lab, he was fashioning what was at that time the largest computer system ever envisioned thus far in the early days of the computer industry. That engineering lab was located far away from the influence of corporate headquarters in Bloomington, Minn. There was exactly one telephone in the Chippewa Falls facility. It was a red telephone mounted on the wall of the entryway of the lab, and it was to be used only for emergency purposes. My software colleagues and I were more or less viewed as intruders. We soon discovered that Seymour and his engineers had written a basic operating system for his large-scale computer system entirely in octal, that is, in numeric machine language. Our first job was to disassemble the octal code for that operating system into symbolic assembler code. The resulting operating system became known as the Chippewa operating system. Seymour also had disaffection for other forms of software. It took months of high-level argument within Control Data Corp. to convince Seymour that a FORTRAN compiler would be needed to make it feasible for the corporation to market his new computer system. That system was intended to be sold as a scientific number crunching machine. One would think that a FORTRAN compiler would have been an obvious requirement. But, such was the undistinguished fate of software in that era. ------------------------------------------------------ [the above was written by Gerry Del Fiacco] Mark R