GCOS field

[dmr at alice.UUCP]

A couple of brief historical notes--

GCOS used to be GECOS and was GE's, and is now Honeywell's system.
Xerox wasn't involved.

The field in the password file originally
contained a G[E]COS login name and account number and was used
when jobs were sent to that system from Unix.
Mostly these jobs printed things on a line printer, definitely not
a typesetter.  We were the ones who had that (and didn't have
a fast printer).

B was done on the PDP-7 in an interpretive implementation.
On the -7, I wrote a cross-compiler for it to the Honeywell--
actually still GE at that time.  This was a peculiar sort
of tour-de-force, since it worked in 4K words of memory.
The interpreter had a software paging mechanism, so the
virtual space was larger.

Later, in the early '70s, Steve Johnson spent a year at Waterloo
and took the B compiler with him.  It became popular there,
and even had some offshoots-- Eh and Zed.

Incidentally, Steve brought back some interesting perceptions about
change.  Previously, Waterloo had become well-known for WATFOR,
a quick, student-oriented version of Fortran that ran on IBM systems.
A little later, Morven Gentleman moved (from BTL) to Waterloo
and brought in Honeywell equipment, mainly because
of its superior (among then available commercial systems) interactive
computing.  This was a sort of revolution that rousted the batch
WATFOR hegemony, and B flourished.  Not too much later,  Unix
came in, and there was another revolution.

	Dennis Ritchie