its
ITS - Incompatible Timesharing System
ITS is a timesharing system created at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1967 for their PDP-6 computer. It was soon moved to the newer PDP-10; for most of its life ITS ran on four of those machines. ITS is known for it's lack of security (no passwords, no file permissions), using a debugger as the login shell, and pioneering many famous programs.
The SDF ITS is at https://hactrn.org/ and is running on a KA10 emulator with an attached PDP-11 for serving Knight TV raster graphics terminals.
Some basic tutorials:
More information can be found by running INFO, and on GitHub.
Bootcamp ideas:
- Log in and create your own user directory. Hint: see “basic tutorials” above.
- Run
:INFO INFO
to learn how to read the system documentation. Read “INTRO” to learn some ITS basics. List all the files in the INFO directory. - Create a file using EMACS. Hint1
:INFO EMACS
. Hint2:TEACHEMACS
. - Start several jobs in parallel and switch between them. Hint1:
^Z
. Hint2:$J
. Hint3:$P
. Hint4:$$V
. - Write, compile, link, and run a small C program. Hint1:
.INFO.; CC RECENT
. Hint2:C; CDOC >
- Learn PDP-10 programming with
:INFO PDP-10
. Do one of the examples. Hint:INFO MIDAS
- Get 50 points in Zork. Hint1:
ZORK^K
. Hint2:score
. - Compute the derivative and integral of an expression in Macsyma. Hint1:
:MACSYMA
- Write a function in Maclisp to print “hello world”. Hint1:
LISP^K
. Hint2::INFO LISP
. - Learn about Lisp from the automated tutor:
:teach;lisp
.
Suggested topics to explore:
- Zork and Advent, classic text adventure games.
- Emacs, the first version.
- Maclisp and Scheme, major Lisp dialects.
- Macsyma, symbolic math.
- Logo, programming for kids.
- C, pre-K&R version.
- Muddle, the Dynamic Modeling programming language.
- Maze, the 3D first person shooter (needs an Imlac emulator).
its.txt · Last modified: 2024/09/05 00:36 by hc9