TYPSET is an editor where you can add and change text, including control codes to specify output formatting. This uses the same editor commands as EDC and EDL (in fact, as described in an earlier article, the design for these editors came from TYPSET; see that article for how to use the editor).

TYPSET expects the name2 of a file to be (MEMO), so the command TYPSET abc will create or edit a file ABC (MEMO). It uses 12-bit line-marked files, so with a suitable typewriter you could enter lower case and an extended range of symbols. If you are using a recent version of s709/ctss-kit or my quickstart or eliza-ctss released after 22 May 2025 this will support it as well.

Control words always start with a . (dot) in column 1. There are full and abbreviated forms, eg .center, which will center the next line, can be abbreviated as .ce.

A full list of control words:

As the output for this system was a typewriter, there was obviously no concept of bold, italics, different fonts, text size etc. One feature the typewriter did have that we don't have today was backspacing. For example, to get something like Ç you could enter C, then backspace, then ,. The system will move the head back one character on backspace so the two symbols print in the same space.

The RUNOFF command takes the input memo file, interprets the control words and prints the formatted output to the typewriter console. It prompts the user LOAD PAPER, HIT RETURN so the paper can be changed if needed.

As an example, the screenshot above was produced by this file:

.ll 80
.ds
.header TIMERESHARED.COM
.hm center
.bp
.center
CTSS: Document production with TYPSET and RUNOFF

The concept of using computers to produce documents was first
demonstrated before CTSS in 1960 with the Colossal Typewriter project
on the PDP-1. Rather than typing directly to paper, you could store
text and edit it in memory before printing to a typewriter or line
printer. However, in single user mode, it was not a cost-efficient use
of a computer, as alluded to by a similar PDP-1 project Expensive
Typewriter.

TYPSET/RUNOFF are described more fully in the CTSS Programmer's Guide section AH.9.01 p504; there's an OCR'd version at multicians.org.

These commands was the inspiration for similar text production systems on Multics and Unix. On a Unix system today you are likely to find troff which uses very similar control words.

May 2025: Updated to point to the newer versions of the s709 emulator/ctss-kit for full support of lower case letters. Thanks to Dave Pitts for his continued work on this system.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com and I will add it here and update the main text.

The CTSS supervisor contains basic functionality for users to enter commands. During the design of Multics, this concept was developed further to create the idea of a shell, a program intended for humans to enter commands and monitor what is going on. From the Multics design memo:

[…] unlike a calling program, a user is not assigned once and for all a predetermined set of instructions. One does not know what he plans to do next, and he will eventually overlook some yet highly recommendable checking, if the command does not warn him against any possible misunderstanding as to what has been performed.

This idea was brought back to CTSS by Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris in 1965 with the creation of "dot".

Installation: "dot" is included on simh. On s709, you will need a recent version of the CTSS kit to run this - either version 1.0.10 or later from Dave Pitts' site or a version of my quickstart or eliza-ctss released after 1 May 2025. Reinstall your system, then start CTSS and login as user sysdev password system. Run the runcom mkdot command. This will compile and install "dot" as a system component.

To start it, just type . You will notice the prompt changes to an abbreviated form of the R and W notifications. "dot" will reload itself after you run a command, but in some cases, for example after an error, it will be suspended, so type RSTAT to continue

.

W 1508.2
R       

hello

W
MIT8C0: 2 USERS AT 05/03/25 1509.3, MAX = 30
R                                           
 
xxx

W
 'XXX' NOT FOUND.
 TYPE RSTART TO IGNORE.
R .100+.150            
           
rstart

W 1509.7
R

hello , listf * mad

W
MIT8C0: 2 USERS AT 05/03/25 1451.4, MAX = 30
                                            
     3 FILES     5 RECORDS
 NAME1  NAME2 MOD NOREC   USED
 HELLO    MAD 000     1         
BOTTLE    MAD 000     1 04/14/25
  CQA1    MAD 000     3         

R

( mad loadgo ) hello

W
LENGTH 00020.  TV SIZE 00003.  ENTRY 00011
EXECUTION.                                
 HELLO WORLD
  EXIT CALLED. PM MAY BE TAKEN.
R .166+.050

mad ( hello bottle )

W
LENGTH 00020.  TV SIZE 00003.  ENTRY 00011
LENGTH 00155.  TV SIZE 00003.  ENTRY 00070
R

dc ls listf cp move
W
R
 
abbrev com
W
 
    LS   LISTF
    CP    MOVE
              
R
 
ls * mad
W
 
     3 FILES     5 RECORDS
 NAME1  NAME2 MOD NOREC   USED
BOTTLE    MAD 000     1 05/03/25
 HELLO    MAD 000     1         
  CQA1    MAD 000     3 04/14/25
                                

R

A separate facility from "dot" was the electronic mail command MAIL. The design and history of this is covered by Tom Van Vleck (one of MAIL's original authors) at multicians.org which is well worth a read.

A quick demo of how it is used. Say I am logged on as SYSDEV and I want to send an email to GUEST. I put my message in a file, here HELLO TXT, and send it using MAIL.

p hello txt    
W 1924.2
        
HELLO GUEST, WELCOME TO CTSS.
                             
R .000+.033
           
mail hello txt m1416 guest
W 1925.1
R .016+.016

When GUEST logs in, they will see

YOU HAVE     MAIL   BOX

and they can view the message by printing the file.

p mail box
W 1926.8
        
 FROM M1416 6 IN M1416 SYSDEV AT 04/27 1925.1
HELLO GUEST, WELCOME TO CTSS.                
                             

R .016+.033

The source code for the MAIL program is in com5/ in the CTSS kit. As mentioned in the article, the program is simple (only 250 lines of MAD code) and contains a hard coded list of users who can email * *, ie all users:

    INTERNAL FUNCTION(X,Y)
    ENTRY TO USRCHK.
   R
    WHENEVER X.NE.$ M1416$ .OR. (Y.NE.$   385$ .AND. Y
   1  .NE. $  4301$ .AND. Y .NE. $  2962$ .AND. Y .NE.
   2  $  3845$)
   3  , ERROR RETURN

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com

In a multi-user system a programmer should no longer have direct access to all hardware resources; access needs to be mediated through the operating system.

As several programs can be loaded in core memory at any time, CTSS prevents direct access to memory that is not part of your program. For example, take this assembly language program.

        CLA     0
        TSX     CHNCOM,4
 CHNCOM TIA     =HCHNCOM
        END

The important line here is the first one: CLA addr will clear the accumulator and load it with the contents of memory at address addr. The remaining two lines will cause the program to exit by calling the CHNCOM system routine.

Compiling and executing this program works fine. But if I change the address to 7000 it will give a protection error.

p test fap
W 954.3
       
	CLA	7000
	TSX	CHNCOM,4
CHNCOM	TIA	=HCHNCOM
	END             
           

R .016+.016
           
fap test
W 954.3
     LENGTH     4
R .016+.000      
           
loadgo test
W 954.4
EXECUTION.
 PROTECTION MODE VIOLATION AT 05360.
 INS.=050000015530, RI.=000000000000, PI.=005364000000
R .000+.016

Internally this is handled by the supervisor setting two protection registers representing the upper and lower bounds of memory areas the program can reach, along with a relocation register to map logical to physical address.

There is also protection against trying to change these registers, or trying to access I/O devices directly.

Early versions of CTSS had a login command to identify which user wanted to start a session: the user would provide their problem and programmer number but no password was required. The CTSS Programmer's Guide from 1963 states:

In the future an additional parameter may be required in order to afford greater security for the user. This will probably be in the form of a private code given separately; explicit instructions will be given by the login command if necessary.

Passwords were probably added around May 1964 according to Time Sharing System Notes #4. When the user entered the login command, the computer would prompt for the password and turn off the typewriter's print head so the user could enter it without it being displayed. If it matched, the user was logged in.

Note the login command prints different error messages depending on whether the user name or password was incorrect, which does mean it is possible to determine whether a user name is valid.

login nouser  
W 1025.2
Password
NOUSER NOT FOUND IN DIRECTORY
 LOGIN COMMAND INCORRECT     
READY.                  
      
login guest
W 1025.4
Password
 PASSWORD NOT FOUND IN DIRECTORY
 LOGIN COMMAND INCORRECT        
READY.

User information is stored in the file UACCNT TIMACC in common files #2. Passwords are stored in plain text. It is possible to view the file using the emulated system; in the real system this likely would have had file protection set so non-system users could not open it. Here we can see that user guest's password is system.

comfil 2
W 1050.9
R .000+.000
           
p UACCNT TIMACC
W 1050.9
...        
GUEST	 5000001000000GUEST 000001000001000000SYSTEM
000000004000000000000360000360000360000360000360    
...

Further control was provided by specifying a group of lines the user could login from, and giving each user a quota of time to access the system, divided into shifts (for example, shift 1 was Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm).

Contents of these files were set by operations staff; it is not possible for the user to change their password online.

The structure of the user accounting files is described in the 1969 Programmer's Guide section AD.5.

The IEEE put together The CTSS Fiftieth Anniversary Commemorative Overview which contains many interesting stories about CTSS. There is one entry by Allan Scherr who was about to lose access to system files and CPU quota, but wanted to find a way to keep running his program.

Late one Friday night, I submitted a request to print the password files and very early Saturday morning went to the file cabinet where printouts were placed and took the listing out of the M1416 folder. I could then continue my larceny of machine time.

As the passwords were in plain text, the printout of the file was all that was needed to get access to other accounts.

Another story in the IEEE overview recounted by Tom Van Vleck recounts how Bill Mathews noticed an error where the password file had been mixed up with the message of the day file so all users could see passwords for other users when they logged in. Bill wanted to limit the damage by crashing the machine: the way he did this was to enter the debugger and issue the assembly instruction XEC *. XEC means read the word at the given address and execute it; * means the current address, so this is effectively an infinite loop.

We can recreate this on the emulated system (using FAP):

edc splat fap
W 1836.2
 FILE  SPLAT   FAP NOT FOUND.
Input:                       
	XEC	*
	END

Edit:
file 

R .016+.016
           
fap splat
W 1836.4
     LENGTH     1
R .016+.033      
           
load splat
W 1836.9
R .000+.016
           
start
W 1836.9
EXECUTION.

Now the program (and all other user sessions) do not respond to further input and even the s709 emulator needs to be force killed to recover from this.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com

The Fortran Assembly Program was used on batch operating systems to assemble FORTRAN compiler output and user assembly code. As mentioned in the article on early software, this was based on work one by individual 7x sites and eventually adopted by IBM as part of IBSYS and FMS. This code was ported to CTSS to run interactively and used for most of the low level operating system code.

Although the opcodes and operands are hardware specific, the format of code as shown above would be familiar to machine code programmers today, with labels on the left followed by instructions in column 8, and then optional comments.

To assemble name1 fap on CTSS, use the command FAP name1. It takes the optional argument (LIST) if you want to produce a listing, and (SYMB) to produce a symbol table for debugging.

All the below are on bitsavers. The IBM Principles of Operation describes the architecture and opcodes for the 7094. This should be read before the FAP manual on how to run the assembler. James Saxon's 1964 book Programming the IBM 7090 may be an easier way to learn assembly as it is structured as a series of lessons.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com

John McCarthy and colleagues developed the first version of Lisp at MIT. It originally targeted the IBM 704 and had its own batch operating system (called Overlord) and assembler. The first fully working version was called Lisp 1.5 and documented in the 1962 book LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual. It was originally developed as an interpreter but a compiler, written in Lisp, was soon added.

At this point in history, the notation for list expressions was not the universal S-expression we know today. The book uses M-expressions, which has square brackets. There was also the 'doublet form' used to enter expressions at the top level. For example, take this CONS expression which takes as parameters the symbol A and the list (B C) to form (A B C):

Internally, Lisp stored two 15 bit cells in each 36 bit machine word, with the left hand cell taking up the space used by the address portion of the word when viewed as a IBM 7x machine code instruction, and the right hand cell in the decrement portion. This led to the primitive functions CAR and CDR used to access the address and decrement portions; these functions are still used today despite the link to the original hardware being long gone.

The version we have today derives from a port of this original code to CTSS in around 1965. Although the 1969 CTSS Programmer's Guide indicates that features specially for CTSS were added, such as a listen mode where commands could be typed interactively, the version we have seems to be an earlier one that does not have this.

The Lisp binary contains only definitions of fundamental functions like CONS, CAR etc; higher level standard functions such as REVERSE or even DEFINE were done in Lisp as an external library. This library can be loaded into the interpreter and then core saved to a new executable file, speeding up invocation of programs.

Below is an implementation of the TPK algorithm in Lisp 1.5, taking into account the limitations mentioned above.

• Library functions, namely DEFINE, APPEND, REVERSE, SQRT and ABS, are implemented separately in a library; I took DEFINE

from existing code and provided implementations for the others based on the Programmer's Manual.

• As there is no interactive input, the numbers acting as input to TPK

are hard coded into the function call.

DEFINE ((
    (F (LAMBDA (X) (PLUS (SQRT (ABS X)) (TIMES 5 (EXPT X 3))))
    )
    (LIMIT-F (LAMBDA (X) (PROG (RESULT)
         (SETQ RESULT (F (CAR X)))
         (RETURN (COND
                  ((GREATERP RESULT 400) (QUOTE TOO-LARGE))
                  (T RESULT)))))
    )
    (TPK (LAMBDA (NUMS)
                 (MAPLIST (REVERSE NUMS) (QUOTE LIMIT-F)))
    )
))

TPK ((10 -1 1 2 3 4 4.3 4.305 4.303 4.302 4.301))
STOP

This uses doublet form to invoke functions and the indentation is what was commonly used at the time.

The code should be read from bottom to top.

TPK reverses the list and calls MAPLIST on this, which will call LIMIT-F 11 times with lists formed by removing the first item in turn, ie (10 -1 1 2 ...), (-1 1 2 ...) (1 2 ...) etc. MAPCAR would be a better choice on more modern Lisps.

LIMIT-F uses a PROG and a local variable RESULT so the function F is only called once per number. The COND checks the result and returns the symbol TOO-LARGE if over 400, else the result.

The first step is to load the library file created for this project into the base Lisp interpreter, and save the resultant binary to a new excitable file.

lisp lib
W 1818.8
06978   
 VALUE
 NIL  
 VALUE
 DEFLIST
 VALUE  
 DEFINE
 VALUE 
 (APPEND REVERSE SQRT ABS)
R .016+.066               
           
save mylisp
W 1818.9
R .000+.066

This can then be run against the solution.

r mylisp tpk
W 1819.0
 VALUE  
 (F LIMIT-F TPK)
 VALUE          
 ( 0.39988629E3 TOO-BIG TOO-BIG TOO-BIG  0.39960863E3  0.322E3
  0.13673205E3  0.41414213E2  0.6E1 -0.4E1 TOO-BIG)           
R .016+.050

Full details on Github.

A great deal of information on the history of Lisp can be found at softwarepreservation.org.

I welcome any questions or comments, and also especially any corrections if I have got something wrong. Please email me at rupert@timereshared.com