On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 4:14 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote:
> For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C
> compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell.
> Especially for x86. Anyone have tales?
> Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX?
An unusual one would be the “revenue bomb” compiler that Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie did at Microsoft in 1981.
This compiler was intended to provided a uniform environment for the menagerie of 8 and 16-bit computers of the era. It compiled to a byte code which executed through a small interpreter. This by itself was hardly new of course, but it had some unique features. It generated code in overlays, so that it could run a code base larger than 64KB (but it defined only one data segment). It also defined a small set of “system” commands, that allowed for uniform I/O. I still have the implementation spec for that interpreter somewhere.
This compiler was used for the first versions of Multiplan and Word, and my understanding is that the byte code engine was later re-used in Visual Basic. I think the compiler also had a Xenix port, maybe it even was Xenix native (and at this time, Xenix would still essentially have been V7).
I am not sure to what extent this compiler was independent of the Bell compilers. It could well be that it was based on PCC, Microsoft was a Unix licensee after all and at the time busy doing ports. On the other hand, Charles Simonyi would certainly have been capable of creating his own from scratch. I do know that this compiler preceded Lattice C, the latter of which was distributed by Microsoft as Microsoft C 1.0.
Maybe others know more about this Simonyi/Brodie compiler?
Paul
Notes:
http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htmhttps://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.computerworld.com/sof…http://seefigure1.com/images/xenix/xenix-timeline.jpg
> The author of this routine has been writing
> random-number generators for many years and has
> never been known to write one that worked.
It sounds like Ken to me. Although everybody had his
own favorite congruential random number generator,
some worse than others, I believe it was Ken who put
one in the math library.
The very fact that rand existed, regardless of its quality,
enabled a lovely exploit. When Ken pioneered password
cracking by trying every word in word lists at hand, one
of the password files he found plenty of hits in came from
Berkeley. He told them and they responded by assigning
random passwords to everybody. That was a memorable
error. Guessing that the passwords were generated by
a simple encoding of the output of rand, Ken promptly
broke 100% of the newly "hardened" password file.
Doug
The zorland c compiler from zortech, x86 pc compiler from a small uk company.
i used it to write my final year project at college in 1988. sadly i couldn’t use the interdata running v7 as i was doing image processing and needed to access an ISA framestore card.
i built a motion compensated video standards converter, and thanks to the 80287 i managed something like 6 hours per frame.
i think zortech claimed they wrote one of the first c++ compilers (rather than using c++).
-Steve
For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C
compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell.
Especially for x86. Anyone have tales?
Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX?
Perspective from a friend...
Warner
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk(a)phk.freebsd.dk>
Date: Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 2:24 AM
Subject: non-Bell C compiler
To: <imp(a)freebsd.org>
I noticed the "non-bell C" thread on TUHS and can add a data point
from datamuseum.dk:
The Danish Company "Christian Rovsing A/S" evidently had a C-compiler
for their CR80 mini computer, and my guess is that they created it
in order to qualify for DoD contracts in the POSIX regime.
Example C source:
https://datamuseum.dk/aa//cr80/80/802c73092.html
Listing file from the compiler:
https://datamuseum.dk/aa//cr80/ef/ef65339dc.html
Listing file from the assembler:
http://datamuseum.dk/aa/cr80/32/32ef5456f.html
Listing from the linker:
https://datamuseum.dk/aa//cr80/17/170304129.html
So far we have not spotted the actual compiler anywhere
in the media we have read.
Mention of C being used for project delivery:
http://datamuseum.dk/aa/cr80/1c/1c0b47f0e.html
And btw: That one is from a CDC disc-pack which a father+son
team has read by building a SMD-USB converter.
That project may be interesting in the TUHS domain as well:
https://github.com/Datamuseum-DK/pico-smd-controller
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk(a)FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
I've been using some variant of Linux (currently Debian 12) as my
primary OS for daily activities (email, web, programming, photo
editing, etc.) for the past twenty years or so. Prior to that it was
FreeBSD for nearly ten years after short stints with Minix and Linux
when they first came out. At the time (early/mid 90's), I was working
for Bell Labs and had a ready supply of SCSI drives salvaged from
retired equipment. I bought a Seagate ST-01A ISA SCSI controller for
whatever 386/486 I owned at the time and installed Slackware floppy by
floppy.
When I upgraded to a Pentium PC for home, Micron P90 I think, I
installed a PCI SCSI controller (Tekram DC-390 equipped with an
NCR53c8xx chip) to make use of my stash of drives. Under Linux it was
never entirely stable. I asked on Usenet and someone suggested trying
the other SCSI driver. This was the ncr driver that had been ported
from FreeBSD. My stability problems went away and I decided to take a
closer look at FreeBSD. It reminded me of SunOS from the good old pre-
System V era along with the version of Unix I had used in grad school
in the late 70's/early 80's so I switched.
I eventually reverted back to Linux because it was clear that the user
community was getting much larger, I was using it professionally at
work and there was just a larger range of applications available.
Lately, I find myself getting tired of the bloat and how big and messy
and complicated it has all gotten. Thinking of looking for something
simpler and was just wondering what do other old timers use for their
primary home computing needs?
Jeff
Because I sometimes use ArcMap, I run Windows. Cygwin plus the sam editor
make me feel at home. The main signs of Microsoft are the desktop, Bing,
File Explorer and Task Manager.
Hello everyone, I reach out in my time of need regarding a potential source of DMERT materials. I've recently come into possession of a hard disk unit from a 5ESS switch, presumably the 5ESS-2000 variant, part UN 375G:
https://i.imgur.com/yQzY5Hs.jpeg
The actual disk itself appears to be a Ultra320 SCSI disk, which I unfortunately do not have the tools to do anything with myself. After looking into various solutions, I'm not getting the warm fuzzies about finding the necessary hardware on my first shot, these sorts of hardware specifics are not my strong suit. The story I got is it is from a working system, so could possibly have artifacts, but at the same time, I've already sunk a little over $1,000 into getting this, I'm hesitant to drop more on hardware I'm not 100% confident is correct for the job.
Does anyone have any recommendations, whether a service, hardware, anything, that I could use to try and get at what is on this disk? Even if it's just sending it off to someone along with enough storage for them to make me a dd image of the thing, I just feel so close yet so far on finally figuring out if I've managed to land a copy of DMERT.
Thanks in advance for any advice, I'm really hoping that the end of this story is I find DMERT artifacts to get archived and preserved, that would be such a satisfying conclusion to all this 3B20/5ESS study as of late. I wish I had the resources to see the rest through myself but this is getting into an area I have quite a bit of trepidation regarding. What I don't want to do is inadvertently damage something by getting it wrong.
- Matt G.
[image: unnamed.png]
CCA EMACS? That's a name I have not heard in a long time ...
I forgot if I'm not allowed to load images, sorry if I just made a mistake.
Normally I wouldn't cross the beams like this but a comment thread John
Nagle posted on this HN story is well written and for me was a great read.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630457
