[HECnet] Tops-20 ANONYMOUS FAL Preliminary Testing Results/DAP Query

/A bit of things snipped./ I don't believe I've ever heard of Multos; I was using OS/8 and TSS-8 in the early 70's before I got access to a PDP-10, which was felt to have a more powerful and interesting instruction set.? It certainly floored some of my PDP-8 friends. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the total number of operating systems across the board was amazing.? For the PDP-10, there was Tops-10, ITS, Tops-20 (TENEX) and WAITS (off the top of my head).? But the minicomputers were something else altogether. Wow.? I help managed the CS lab at my undergraduate college, where we had a PDP-11/05 and an 11/45 (with a GT40).? It seemed to me that every time I turned around, I was tripping over another operating system for one of them. We had an RK05 with an early version of Unix (circa 1977).? It was looked at and summarily dismissed as "Interesting; needs to get finished".? We stuck with RT11 and RSX because they had more functionality, were faster and used less resources.? Little did we know...? Now, unless you are on an IBM mainframe, it seems you pretty much get your choice of Windows or Unix.? I've programmed iOS (under Swift) and deep down, well, you know.?? Eye popping graphics, though.? We never had that.? And pretty much infinite memory. None the less, there can be a lot of great ideas that come up when you're doing something something from scratch and this is particularly evident in the realm of file system syntax.? I continue to believe that DEC:'s grammar and built-in parsing is superior to anything you can get on Unix, where all of that is tossed out the window and you get "/".? Windows, which will allow you to specify a device (but not wildcard it) is only marginally better. I'm reminded of a talk that Rob Pike gave at the turn of the millennium, "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant".? I don't agree with everything he says because I do follow some of the research, but still, it's grim reading.? What I've found is that you can get some good ideas by seeing what other people where doing whose backs were up against the wall and what they thought they'd never be able to do (based on the hardware restrictions). That's surprising about no BLISS on the PDP-8.? On my first day at DEC as a Tops-20 programmer, we got stuck into a BLISS COMMON class and received the corporate indoctrination.?? Then we went on to design the File Finder project in MACRO.? BLISS did get used, particularly when something got tossed at us from another platform.?? But I can't remember what major package was written in it.? Algol wasn't.? There is a new part of Galaxy that I have yet to fathom called "FTS" that is written in BLISS.? I don't understand the EXEC interface to it; perhaps there is a monitor interface. Has anybody heard of it?