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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ancient OS history, ARM is sort of channeling the IBM 360
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2024 16:00:51 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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According to Thomas Koenig  <tkoenig@netcologne.de>:
>> Pipelines work equally well with fixed length records.  They were
>> familar with byte streams from PDP-10, Multics, and other systems
>> they'd worked with.
>
>Did these systems actually feature byte streams?  Both the PDP-10
>and the GE 635 were word-oriented machines with 36 bits, so I
>assume it must have been word streams at least.

TOPS-10 did disk I/O to and from block buffers in the user's address
space, but the system calls set up a byte pointer and a count so you
could fetch or store one byte at a time. A line was anything up to
CR/LF (and maybe form feed and other control characters) with the
convention that you ignored null bytes.

The same system calls worked on ttys and paper tapes, where it read
up to a CR/LF and put it in the buffer.  So either way the application
saw a stream of bytes.

Never used GCOS and never did non-trivial programming on DTSS so I
couldn't tell you what they did.  DTSS had communication files which
were a lot like pipes.  See
https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/DTSS/commfiles.pdf

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly