HISTORY OF PUTRIDOS by the PutriDos Users' Group PutriDos had rather inauspicious beginnings. A group of college students, cruising the south seas on a tramp steamer, had been wrecked on a desert island. Among them were Hiram Fortran, now president of PutriSoft, Inc., and Henrietta Cobol, who now runs the PutriTech Corporation. The island was a little larger and better equipped than the ones you see in cartoons of people shipwrecked on islands. Food and water were available, and shelter was easily improvised. After these essentials were secured, however, there seemed nothing else to do. Boredom hung heavy in the humid air. Among the items salvaged from the ship was a set of documentation for an early home computer. There was no software, no documentation for software, and no working computer, but there was complete information on the hardware, including the machine's instruction set and information on optional peripherals such as terminals and disk drives. There was also a large supply of pencils and paper. The group soon developed a sort of game. One of them would write out a series of machine-language instructions in hex, and the others would try to figure out what that program did. They soon got quite good at it, but began to tire of the game. Then Hiram had an idea: "Let's write an operating system." Although none of them had worked on operating systems before, Hiram and Henrietta had used them and most of the group had heard of them. They would figure out what a system ought to do, write code for it, and then go through the old game to debug it. By the time they were rescued Hiram had a list of simple (if tedious) hex patches that would enable him to update a blank disk to PutriDos 0.00. Upon return to civilization Hiram married Henrietta. With venture capital from her father he bought a home computer and installed PutriDos on it, then founded PutriSoft, Inc., staffed with fellow survivors of the island ordeal. Although PutriDos seemed rather strange, it sold moderately well. These days of happiness were numbered. After years of gradually increasing difficulties Hiram and Henrietta's marriage foundered. Henrietta, embittered by the scandalous divorce and the traumatic court battles in which she was forced to accept custody of their children, founded PutriTech Corporation and began marketing a version of PutriDos in competition with that of her now-hated former husband (The copyright laws of the original desert island allowed this). Deciding to begin anew with a clean slate, she resumed her maiden name and restarted the version and revision numbering of her PutriDos at 0.00 (Hiram's was up to around 7.29 at the time). Disillusioned by the divorce, Hiram became increasingly paranoid. Convinced that his workers were secretly on Henrietta's side, Hiram fired them all. One group of them banded together to found PUTRIDOS, INC., making available a third line of PutriDos versions. Not wishing to appear to take sides in the divorce matter by using Hiram's version numbering or starting over like Henrietta, they initially decided to eschew such numbering altogether. Later they relented to the extent of assigning random numbers to some revisions. Others of a less entrepreneurial bent went on to other jobs but remained interested enough in PutriDos to form the first PutriDos Users' Group. During the divorce proceedings customer support of PutriDos had suffered, and afterwards the conflicting version numbering caused some confusion among users. The Users' Group filled a need and quickly gathered a large following. PutriDos remains to this day a somewhat unusual operating system. This is partly due to the bottom-up design philosophy of its inventors who felt that if any emergency arose the user would be happy to drop into the debugger and patch away the problem. In addition, some of the system programmers were reputedly inexperienced in system programming, leading to such unusual assumptions as having the system calls that handle random disk accesses randomly choose the sectors to read or write as distinct from having the calling program pick them. Through it all the PutriDos Users' Group has provided much-needed support and encouragement to PutriDos users, often at the nitty-gritty machine-code level. The number of instances in which they have had to battle bugs byte by byte has inspired the Group's battle cry: Next time you are feeling alone in some crowded place, just hold your nose and wave your other hand high in the air while shouting "Simple Hex Patches!" If anyone responds in kind, you know you have found a fellow member of the Group and a kindred spirit. Original written 1725 hr 8/12/84 This version 0030 hr 11/29/93 -- Tom Digby bubbles@well.sf.ca.us for Putri-DOS Users' Group