ITS features seen in the wild

PDP-10 / its

Incompatible Timesharing System

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ITS features seen in the wild #966

Closed larsbrinkhoff closed 5 years ago

larsbrinkhoff commented 6 years ago

Unix job control came from ITS thru MIT alumnus Jim Kulp.
Dan Halbert wrote BSD "more" inspired by ITS "--MORE--" facility.

What else?

atsampson commented 6 years ago

Some versions of finger (e.g. the Minix 3 one) have an ITS-inspired output format. Keith Gabryelski in news:1582@amix.commodore.com:

There are several finger implimentations out there. One of which was written by me that emulates the ITS finger with WHAT and TTYLOC fields.

news:630@brl-tgr.ARPA has a Unix port of OCTPUS by Barry Shein.

ispell, according to its man page, "is fashioned after the spell program from ITS (called ispell on Twenex systems)". Early versions came with a copy of ML: WBA; DICT 191.

George Carrette in news:8902012055.AA11642@bucsf:

Pace Willison actually did quite a nice scheme pretty printer while at the now-defunct LispMachineInc. He was modeling the thing after the famous ITS @ATSIGN program listing generator, and had it generating cross references and bold fonts and everything. I think the code produced a DVI file directly, and was written in lispmachine lisp.

larsbrinkhoff commented 6 years ago

GNU Emacs is obviously a reimplementation of EMACS. I'm not sure if Emacs Lisp owes more to Maclisp or Lisp Machine Lisp, but it's very similar to the former.
Likewise, GNU Info is compatible with INFO.
The concept of filename defaulting in Common Lisp.
Common Lisp pathnames accomodate old file systems like ITS.

atsampson commented 6 years ago

Plenty of other versions of Emacs, as well - e.g. MicroEmacs has comments like /* ITS EMACS does this */.

The GNU system generally seems to be Unix with most of ITS's nicer features added - for example, being able to use a shell before logging in, userspace filesystems, attaching a debugger automatically when a program crashes...

rmaldersoniii commented 6 years ago

IMAO, Emacs Lisp owes more to MACLISP (proper capitalization--cf. 1st edition of Winston & Horn) than to Lisp Machine Lisp. MACLISP was ported to Multics by Greenberg, and EMACS was implemented in that MACLISP on Multics, before EINE or ZWEI came into being. Again, IMAO. Given the goals of Common Lisp, it shouldn't be surprising that it can accommodate the filenaming syntax of multiple systems, especially those from PDP-10 operating systems!

larsbrinkhoff commented 6 years ago

The use of : and @ modifiers in Common Lisp FORMAT control strings were probably inspired by TECO.

larsbrinkhoff commented 5 years ago

Written by @hga on Wikipedia:

If you think about what a relatively small number of people accomplished with PDP-10 assembler and ITS TECO in a 1MB address space system, without a central project manager, all this plus the 4 systems being intimately linked through the ARPANET (you could e.g. access any file by just putting "AI:" or DM, MC, or ML in front of it), well, it was influential beyond what you might expect, and in more than just a feature list. Hga 09:39, 25 October 2007 (UTC)