Hugh Foster wrote:
Commodore Pet for me - builtin tape drive - and then the mighty Sinclair Spectrum, then DEC/VAX... VAX/VMS was a sort of corporate LINUX, I suppose, take UNIX and rewrite it the way we like it. Then PCs, and now my toe in the Linux pool. And the young Oracle "programmers" sitting around me panic when they see a command prompt! :)
Actually, I believe VMS was a superset of RSX-11M (IIRC RSX stood for Realtime System eXecutive). In another incarnation I had to write some special interrupt service drivers for a multi-channel A-D converter hung on a PDP-11/34. Cute once I discovered that the first thing you had to do when the driver got control was DISABLE INTERRUPTS. Then next thing was clear the interrupt (actually clearing a bit in the I/O page) and then reenable interrupts. If you forgot the first step, in the time it took to clear the bit, you blew the kernel stack as the ISR was driven again, and again, and again, and ...
