Prime Os

OperatingSystem of Pr1me MiniComputers? circa the latter part of the TwentiethCentury?.

The 1 in the name of Pr1me Computers was a reference to the fact their AsciiCode bytes had StickParity? - the EighthBit? was always a one.

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The Prime OS is called Primos.

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Aaah CPL - what a great JCL!

I had friends there but never knew much about what they were up to, what was cool about this "CPL" thing they did?

This eight-bit-always-one thing is also something I didn't remember; that was hardly unique to Prime, so it seems an odd (no pun intended) thing to be a claim to fame. I must be missing something.

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JCL's were usually limited - usually they were just text substitution. With CPL, you could generate and run "base JCL", so could put more intelligence into your run scripts. It was the seventies, so I do not remember the details, but I used to be able to generate two equivalent JCLs from the same source, where one JCL was for running the job on the NCR machine, under VRX, and the other was the (development) Prime machine. Later the JCL was generated for Facom F4 as well. (With a bit of work, IBM's ISPF/CLIST/DMS could be used similarly)

What generated the macro substitutions? I get the gist, but that's a foreign world to me.

I cannot find a CPL manual online (and I do not want to buy one) so hopefully somebody else will be able to answer your question. One thing I remember was that it had syntax which allowed evaluation to generate the variable name. Something like -

 Variable1 = "Variable2"
 Variable2 = "cobia" 
 Print Value.Of(Variable1) - I think it was "Print &&variable1" or something
    cobia
 Print Variable1
    Variable2

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CategoryOperatingSystem