[fpc-other] Yet another mainframe emulator

[Saunders, Rich]

Deeply weird is right!

I fondly remember the Burroughs series. I had to port a very large 
FORTRAN system to it for our client, the Quaker Oats Company. They used 
a set of these mainframes for their main systems.

I loved the idea of the descriptor-oriented architecture. Each file was 
tagged with attributes, such as "Algol source file", "FORTRAN-produced 
object file", or "compiler-produced error log". Each program would only 
accept input from files of the correct type and only produced output 
files tagged with the correct type. This was enforced by the OS. For 
example, if a program was tagged as a compiler would only be able to 
accept input from a file that was properly tagged as a source file of 
the language it compiled and it could only produce files that were 
object code or error logs. Also, the OS only executed files that were 
properly tagged as executable. There were security attributes as well. A 
text editing program would not work on an object file or an executable. 
In fact it automatically knew what was being edited based on the file 
attributes so it could adapt the editing features the the content. Kept 
things nice and organized and orderly. Kept the hacking to a minimum, 
also, I bet.

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Cheers!
Rich Saunders