Jan 18, 2021
Lars Brinkhoff has been spearheading the effort to keep the incompatible Timesharing System alive. Today we sit down to talk about the overall ITS restoration project, software preservation, and how emulation can help save the past.
You can find the full restoration project at github: https://github.com/PDP-10/its
And...
Jan 11, 2021
Modern operating systems adhere to a pretty rigid formula. They all have users with password-protected accounts and secure files. They all have restrictions to keep programs from breaking stuff. That design has been common for a long time, but that doesn't make it the best solution. In the late 60s ITS, the...
Dec 28, 2020
Dec 14, 2020
BASIC is a strange language. During the early days of home computing it was everywhere you looked, pretty much every microcomputer in the 70s and early 80s ran BASIC. For a time it filled a niche almost perfectly, it was a useable language that anyone could learn. That didn't happen by accident. Today we are looking at...
Nov 30, 2020
In 1946 John Eckert and John Mauchly left the Moore School, patented ENIAC, and founded a company. One of those discussions would have consequences that wouldn't be resolved until 1973. Today we close out our series on ENIAC with a look at the legal battle it spawned, and how it put ownership over the rights to basic...
