From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: *** X-Spam-Status: No, score=3.8 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID, RATWARE_MS_HASH,RATWARE_OUTLOOK_NONAME autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,f45b1f6d53ecbae4 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Greg Harvey" Subject: Re: Why couldn't an operating system be written in ada Date: 1996/07/25 Message-ID: <01bb7a48$aa436c80$e4f068ce@zeos.rwi.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 170556824 references: <4s8rud$9j3@tribune> <4sdggj$ksg@news.ida.org> <4se3cc$1rc@gde.GDEsystems.COM> content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 organization: RothWell International mime-version: 1.0 newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-07-25T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Michael Levasseur wrote: > The first Rational machines had an OS written in Ada. There > were some problems with the Disk Subsystem but overall the > system was ahead of its time. The one thing that was most > memorable about the system was that it had in excess of > 300 keys. Anyone who's ever seen the old Rational System > knows about their keyboard. The story is better than this, of course. Rational offered an odd-looking terminal that was longer in the vertical direction than in the horizontal. The display system would then divide this pure-text terminal into separate windows. Each window could then be used to display various kinds of interesting information such as "file system" structure, code that you were editing, and various kinds of status. All of the navigation of this system (which was written BY programmers FOR programmers) was done with the 300+ keys. To accomplish 300+ keys, of course, you have to have key modifiers such as ctrl, meta, hyper, etc. I don't recall the names of the keys on the terminals RATIONAL sold, but I do remember having one of the programmers on my team working the problem of connecting the Rational to different platforms via telnet-style connections. Don Silvasi-Patchin did the work, and it was a beautiful work of art. Since we were doing this for NASA (Software Support Environment for Space Station Freedom), we of course were expected to produce remarkably similar keymaps for all supported platforms which included VT100-compatible terminals, PC's, Mac, and Apollo (don't ask how those became the standards...that is a separate post). Don spent about 3 months massaging the Delta environment until it would in most cases properly recognize which terminal emulator was hitting it and respond in a reasonable fashion. He also spent a lot of time figuring out how he could do he could do the keymaps so that a person who was familiar with them on one computer would have a shallow learning curve if they had to work with them on another computer. The result was then written up and put onto oversized "pocket cards" which prominently displayed the SSE logo. It really was a NICE solution to a tricky problem. The result? SSE didn't really use the Rationals much for programming because the cross-machine targeting issues were trickier than originally imagined. Because Rational had a product that helped with 2167A documentation, the sites that had Rationals tried to use them to produce the volumes and volumes of SSF design documents. This of course was not what the Rational was designed to do, so it took up all available machine resources. This of course prevented what little programming that WAS done on the Rational from getting done in any reasonable time frame, which pushed people onto Unix and PC boxes for development and compiling. Rational caused the demise of their own machine by supporting documentation on it. Getting back to the keymaps, the funny thing was, since only the main SSE project had much of a mixture of machines, in spite of spending 3 months of programmer effort on building a standard keymap, the work package contractors tended to rely on the original, Rational keymap for VT100 because: a) they had learned it first, and b) it was "good enough".