[Info-vax] OS implementation languages

[Simon Clubley]

On 2023-08-24, Phil Howell <phow9917 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
> I used to work for NCR in the 1970s on their I-series machines,
> these were minis that would compete with the VAX when it came out (1977)
> as well as with Burroughs Univac and IBM and some others (DG HP)
> All the OS and utilities were written in a block structured ALGOL-like language,
> When a machine was installed at a customer site, one of the first things to do
> was to run a sysgen, which compiled and linked all this to build a system image to run,
> this was then saved to disk for subsequent use.
> This in-house language  was strictly for use only by systems programmers in
> head office, and not released (AFAIK), but the resultant systems proved very reliable.
> But then DEC in the 1980s was way more successful than NCR or DG anyway...
>

That's seriously interesting thanks. So, contrary to what some are
saying, the idea of writing an OS in such a way was well established
by the mid-1970s. (I'm going off historical documents and the
recollections of people here as in the mid 1970s I wasn't even in
secondary school yet. :-)).

One thing of interest above is you say the OS itself was also written
in this language. Are you referring to the kernel-level code here
or something else ?

Based on what people have said in this thread, I was able to track down
the Algol variant used in AOS/VS. It's called DG/L and has a Wikipedia
page here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/L

The Algol 60 language page is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algol_60

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.