Re: A big thank you to the folks at DELTA

[George Robbins <grr@shandakor.tharsis.com>]

> To: deltoids@mcws.net
> Subject: A big thank you to the folks at DELTA
> Organization: Design Software Group, Parametric Technology Corporation
> Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 15:09:38 -0600
> From: Rich Thomson <rthomson@ptc.com>
> 
> Ron Dozier taught me about linked lists.  (While examining the guts of
> the SIL; remember that?  For that matter, can anyone remember the what
> SIL stood for?  I think it was the code that was loaded off the boot
> block of the disk to start RSTS.)

System Image Library, probably.  It was the DOS/Batch object module
format for holding the executable images.  Early RSTS development was
don't cross-compilation on PDP-10's, and was eventually moved over to
using the DOS-11 operatings sytem, which later became DOS/Batch and
evolved further in the direction of RT11, which was later supported
as one of the RSTS run-time systems.  SIL's popped up somewhere along
the time you could link your own kernel under the DOS/Batch OS.

I guess it was kind of compromise - the OS wasn't really ready to
load from arbitrary files, but a generic boot could find the SIL
file and boot from one of N things in there.  I remember the idea
as begin pretty confusing at the time.

						George