Software

Languages

• PDP8 assembler (local version - extensions to the DEC one)

• Fred King's and Rainer Thonnes' assemblers (in Imp; manufacturer-compatible) (Also 8086, ns32000)

• HAL: High-level Assembly Language

• LC: a Low-level Compiler by Rainer Thonnes which was complementary to HAL.

• Imp family

  • Atlas Autocode - the father of Imp.

  • Skimp - a cut-down version of Imp, for bootstrapping and teaching.

  • Imp

  • IMPI: Imp Interactive Compiler

  • Imp77
    Andy Davis has written a code-generator for Intel which runs on Unix and Windows. The 32-bit Windows version requires that you have M$ C already, but if you don't, you can use the 16-bit version which comes with all the necessary components to compile, link and run your own programs.

    • Soap - Students' 'Orrible 'Andwriting Program (source-code formatter for Imp)

    • The original SOAP was for Algol 60!

    
    

  • Imp80 - Main compiler of the ERCC written by Peter Stephens. Lots of info to follow!

    • Soap80 - Rewritten version of SOAP for Imp80

    
    

  • ML/SML/HOPE - all the functional programming languages

  
  

• Prolog/C-Prolog
  See Bill Clocksin, Chris Mellish, David Warren, Lawrence Byrd, Fernando Pereira.
  A M J Hutchings. Edinburgh Prolog User's Manual. Technical report, AI Applications Institute, University of Edinburgh, UK., 1990.

• POP-2

  • POP2.IMP by Hamish Dewar, for EMAS on the ICL4/75

  • See the article by RayDunn

  • See Robin Popplestone's papers,

    • Design of an Interactive Functional Language, and

    • The Early Development of POP

    • PopUsenetPost

    
    

  • LOGO (AI2LOGO) written by Colin MacArthur, Peter Ross, Ken Johnson and possibly others. Ross & Johnson later produced RM Logo for a 186 system.

  
  

• LISP (Nick Shelness)

• BASIC, and help info

• SALGOL/PS-Algol (Persistent Data support in the language)

• Implementations of Pascal, Fortran, C, Occam etc etc

Operating Systems we wrote

• The Minimac/Multipop Timesharing System

• EMAS

• PDP-8 - The PDP-8 didn't need an operating system as such; it worked from tape to tape and had a TTY and an oscilloscope for vector display! The system was too small to be worth writing an O/S (although we did anyway, if you can call the 'Autocode' library an O/S), but despite that many utilities were written for this machine and it lived on into the early 80's. It was finally donated to the Royal Scottish Museum, and thanks to their guardianship almost all the paper tapes were preserved. Chris Whitfield and Ian Young have been working closely with the RSM, and recently recovered all the paper tapes with a home-made paper tape reader!

• PDP9-15 by Hamish Dewar

• Legos - a diskless operating system for the Interdata-70 series by Paul McLellan

• ISYS

  • ISYS 70

  • ISYS 80

  
  

• Filestore

  • Mk I

  • Mk II

  • APM

  
  

• GUTS - an EMAS-like system for the PDP-11 written by a group of students at Groeningen University in the Netherlands, under the direction of Harry Whitfield. John Butler may have a copy of this on a PDP-11 disk pack which we hope to read some day.

• DCN/Fuzzball (1971) - It is not clear how or exactly when the Fuzzball came to be called that. Its ancestor was born at the University of Edinburgh in 1971 (Actually I now have some info on this received by email which I have to remember to add here...)

• Deimos - PDP-11 O/S by Brian Gilmore, used to route X25 traffic

  • FEPs - front-end processors (terminal concentrators) for EMAS, VMS, and other EDNET-connected hosts.

  • ERTE by Brian Gilmore; apps by Alex Wight. The Edinburgh Remote Terminal Emulator was a load-testing device which simulated interactive users.

  • MUSS11 by Brian Gilmore.

  
  

• Mouses

  • Malcolm Atkinson's Data Curator Project

  
  

• APM OS

• ICL7502 OS by Hamish Dewar

Operating Systems we used

• TOPS-10 - See DavidMercer

• RSX-11

Applications

• Editors

  • Edit4: PDP-8 Context Edit Mark 4. 26th Feb 1968. By Alan Freeman

  • Ecce by Hamish Dewar

  • Edit5b: Chris Whitfield's MSc Thesis Project

  • Edit for EMAS by the ERCC

  • IE by Richard Marshall

  • Screen (aka "S") for VMS by Paul McLellan et al

  
  

• Formatters

  • Layout (early PDP9/15 source) (EMAS Version)

  • Scribe - a local reimplementation in Imp of a commercial program.

  
  

• EDS: Edinburgh Designer System (Robin Popplestone)

• Edwin (Manual)

• ERTE

• Circuit layout tools, simulators

  • DCAP - David's Circuit Assignment Programme

  • Sim

  
  

• VLSI tools

• Databases, QBE, Persistent Data languages

• Amusements

  • The earliest-known self-reproducing program by Hamish Dewar.
    This was the program which inspired list member Paul Bratley (Bratley, Paul and Jean Millo. "Computer Recreations; Self-Reproducing Automata", Software -- Practice & Experience, Vol. 2 (1972). pp. 397-400.) to write their seminal paper on self-reproducing programs. If anyone knows of an earlier self-reproducing program, please let us know. As can be seen from the use of "%CAPTION", this was one of the earliest Imp programs written vecause CAPTION was a language feature carried over from the Atlas Autocode compilers which did not survive for long in Imp (being replaced initially with "%PRINTTEXT" and later with string procedures)
    There is more information about Quine programs on this abandoned web page (last edited 1999).

  • Music: One of the first compilers written in Buccleuch Place was a music compiler for the new PDP8 by David Rees. If I remember correctly, this compiled up to four voices into an intermediate code, which was then interpreted and played by pulsing the loudspeaker of the PDP8. I think I wrote the interpreter/player. At the time, we made some tape recordings of our efforts. --HarryWhitfield (Fred King wrote similar code for the 6809 kits which played the old encoded tunes, also on a 1-bit speaker! --GrahamToal)

Documentation

• Converted for web

• Original files

• Scans