Talk:DIBOL

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DIBOL was originally created for the PDP-8e (later ported to the PDP-11) and ran on a new operating system called COS-310. (Commercial Operating System) The COS-310 system was purchased as a package which included a desk, VT-52 VDT (Video Display Tube), and a pair of eight inch floppy drives. Optionally you could purchase one or more 2.5 MB hard drives that had removable media. I believe the only printer option was a Centronics line printer that connected through a parallel port. Oddly this same hardware was also sold as the DEC Word Processor but with a daisy-wheel printer included.

At one point DIBOL briefly appeared in the DECUS library. I believe this version ran on the OS/8 operating system for the PDP-8e or possibly the older PS/8 OS.

'Pretty sure DIBOL first ran under COS-300 (on those RK05 1.6MW cartridge-disk drives that you mentioned). This system would have been packaged in standard short or tall DEC racks with "pop panels" filling the empty spaces in the rack and the terminals would have been VT05s or LA30s. I think it also could run on either TC8E or TD8E TU56 DECtape storage. IIRC, COS-310 first arrived when the "desk-style" RX01-based PDP-8A system arrived. I don't recall what the difference was between COS-300 and COS-310 besides newer device drivers. (I don't recall for sure, but I'd bet that LA36s and LA180s were supported as printers as well by that time.)

I always found the sites running COS, DIBOL, and commercial applications more boring than the sites running OS/8 and industrial/scientific applications so I didn't learn as much about either COS or DIBOL as I probably should have. :-) I do remember that COS ran with the PDP-8 interrupt system "ON" whereas OS/8 ran with it "OFF"; this lead to the possibility of "undefined interrupt" errors in COS, an error that was impossible in OS/8.

WPS-8 was definitely a derivative of COS-310, sharing the same basic on-diskette filesystem (and probably some OS primatives).

Atlant 16:42, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

In the early 90s I was employed as a DIBOL programmer on DEC VAX/VMS systems. This may not have been the original version of the language, but neither was it using an emulater. The statement in the article "The original version was produced for PDP-8 and PDP-11 systems, though it can also be run on other systems through emulators." doesn't seem to allow for the existence of DIBOL on VMS. Tindwcel 11:39, 8 November 2006 (UTC)