The GSE control system was designed and ran on DEC PDP-11 and was then ported over to the DEC pc running VMS. It took Foxboro DCS a while to port over from Unix workstations to Windows. They first went from workstations to PCs running Venix and Xenix which were mini Unix operating systems which on the PC tended to get hung and require a reboot. Not really good for real-time control. Even when it was ported to Windows NT it was actually running on Unix which NT had an interface for that was named nutcracker. Windows was handling the graphics and interfacing with the Unix core program. Wasn't it NEC that had DEC by that time. My memory is so bad now...

No, NEC never owned DEC. DEC was split into several parts. Compaq bought the bulk of the company. DEC assets were subsequently transferred to HP. But AFAIK, NEC never got their finger in the pie.

 

Worst I did was go to a control system that had a dead floppy drive to change it out so we could make our regular backup disks. Easy-peasy fix with less than 15 minutes interruption. It would not boot back up after I changed the drive and at that time was the ONLY control computer. I spent 20 hours compiling the control system from 360k disks and loading our backup control disks onto it with the production area shut down cold. By the time I had it installed, checked out and running smoothly I had put in a 30+ hour day which according to the safety department and plant regulations was a HUGE NO-NO. That was when I got the funding to make all the control computers redundant and have UPS protection.

Later another guy and I were building a control system in the office. We had the controls operating software on it and I had loaded all my custom faceplate interface designs on it and was configuring all the instrument interfaces and my buddy ended up in the hospital for emergency gall bladder removal. He had invoked the security password to log into the system and could not remember what it was and had not told me... That took a couple of weeks to rebuild from scratch. The good news was the system was very password secure which turned out to also be the bad news.

 

IIRC it DEC's VMS guru Dave Cutler that went to Microsoft to help design their new industrial grade OS: Windows NT, which has morphed several times through W2000, XP, and Win10 I presume.

Somewhat embarrassing but in high school I bought a Radio Shack TRS80. I read it had an RS232 port (which I didn't have hardware to make use of, so had no idea what it was). I thought the RS in RS232 stood for Radio Shack.

 

Windows NT, which has morphed several times through W2000, XP, and Win10 I presume.

It was their first "Windows" OS, but I didn't see nutcracker after NT... I was RIFed when we were using NT so don't know what happened after that. In common parlance, NT stood for Nice Try. I thought it was a pretty damn good compared to MS-DOS. No more config.sys or autoexec.bat if I remember right which is a problem for me these days...

 

IIRC it DEC's VMS guru Dave Cutler that went to Microsoft to help design their new industrial grade OS: Windows NT, which has morphed several times through W2000, XP, and Win10 I presume.

Somewhat embarrassing but in high school I bought a Radio Shack TRS80. I read it had an RS232 port (which I didn't have hardware to make use of, so had no idea what it was). I thought the RS in RS232 stood for Radio Shack.

Computer lore has it that since Dave Cutler was the primary architect for NT, the name has an interesting backstory. Remember the movie 2001? The computer was named HAL, whose letters are one less than those in IBM. The letter H precedes the letter I.

In the naming of Windows NT, a similar scheme was used. For each letter, if you advance one letter in the alphabet, VMS becomes WNT! Windows NT was Dave Cutler’s next OS.

 

Why does everyone forget Windows Me? I think it was a time travelers warning about Millennials that unfortunately evolved into a OS because it was unbelievable (then) humans could exist at that level.

 

Millennial... Did anyone else get sucked into doing "Due Diligence" for Y2K compliance? We had to survey EVERY instrument and computer system on the plant and collect/catalog/print each of their compliance certificates into a paper file folder plus be ON PLANT at midnight and visit in person each operating area to make sure there were no glitches. Then report in person to the Plant Manager in his office who in turn had to call corporate and make his report to them before we could go home. The next day one was found in an EPA and State reporting analysis control software that monitored and recorded its flue gas analysis which looked at the last date it was run which was time/date stamped year 99 and its logic decided that since it was now less than 99 so it didn't need to collect another sample for 100 years. It was custom software written by one of our Home Office staff engineers and therefore there was no company to gather a compliance statement from and the computer it ran on had a compliance certificate. In the words of Pogo "We have met the enemy and it is us".

 

It was their first "Windows" OS, but I didn't see nutcracker after NT... I was RIFed when we were using NT so don't know what happened after that. In common parlance, NT stood for Nice Try. I thought it was a pretty damn good compared to MS-DOS. No more config.sys or autoexec.bat if I remember right which is a problem for me these days...

Actually I think Windows 3.1 was earlier, and based entirely on MSDOS. Windows NT (New Technology?) emerged out of the Cutler project and I think the initial version was 3.51 which was superseded by NT4. 3.1 evolved into Win95, Win98, ME, and then that lineage ended.

The timing was such that we were moving out of VMS and so I ported our lab application to NT, circa 1995. We used VC++/MFC and after years of Unix and VMS development, I was in love. I'm still pretty much a fanboy of Microsoft, at least when it comes to development tools.

 

What about Windows 1.0 and 2.0? They were windowed environments. They used text-graphics. But had windows in which applications could run and could be moved around on the monitor.

 

Ya know I don't remember Win1 and 2,... At home XT, ME then... can't remember... My son was at Home Depot Corporate in Atlanta at the time I last I upgraded my desktop tower OS and had access to the MSs development site and I was able to get Win8 64bit. Then upgraded all to this Alien R5 with Win10 64bit and a solid state 2 terabyte drive that my son speced out for me. Liquid cooled and almost silent. I don't like laptops or pads. I do have a couple of Kindles since my son-in-law was out in Seattle with Amazon and a couple of Echos. That's about as far as I want to go with "smart technology". I'm a switch flipper kind of guy and this voice command stuff just don't feel right. It is kinda nice to tell Alexa what kind of music I want to hear or to give me the weather report.

 

LOL we had a "Windowed" environment in MS-DOS1 & 2 by making ASCII Menus linked to the executables. I was in hog heaven with my first clock/calendar card and not having to tell MS-DOS date and time every time I booted up.