Aug 21, 2016, 7:15 AM

@Chime said in What Do You Collect?:

Most of the ITS machines (and other PDP-10's) were already TCP-aware; indeed many of them formed critical infrastructure of the early Internet. Grant you, the native net stuff was CHAOSnet, which is mostly useless these days, and all the internet connectivity was through an IMP.

IBM was very late in using TCP/IP since they had their own network architecture, SNA/VTAM. Even today many shops are running SNA/IP for local terminals. I don't recall being in a shop that used TCP until well into the mid 90's.

And while IBM did have a C compiler, it was a pain in the ass. Most publicly available C code was in ASCII, so you had to run it through a translator to EBCDIC. And then you had to make extensive use of trigraphs for all the missing braces and other punctuation that didn't exist in EBCDIC. IBM C does have one nice feature though, a native fixed decimal type!

Awkwardly, ITS was a largely pre-security OS. It supports memory protection and arbitrary users, but while you :LOGIN, the default infrastructure has no concept of password. Any random thing that connects can login as whatever it wants and do whatever it wants, including circumventing memory protection. Sure things were audited to line printers, but it was a kinder, gentler internet back then.

IBM OS's had minimal security. If you had a login you could do anything, except to disk files that were protected by the global system password. And there was no real encryption of passwords. Of course IBM sold a security product called RACF that was rock solid and did use encryption. You had to explicitly white list everything that a particular user or sub-system needed.

Anyway, the IBM stuff is especially interesting to me because of the 3270 terminal stuff-- those were brilliant, and I imagine MUD type games could do amazing stuff to take advantage of the form-like features there. ...not that many people here would play such a thing, sigh.

There was series of terminals... 3170G?, 3192G, 3274G which had incredible graphics for the early 1980's. It had text layer and graphics layer that were merged together. The programming of the graphics layer was very similar to SVG.