Re: [TUHS] PDP-10 UNIX?

I worked on, and co-managed, TOPS-20 on DECsystem 20/40 and 20/60 systems with the PDP-10 KL-10 CPU from September 1978 to 31 October 1990, when our 20/60 was retired. (A second 20/60 on our campus in the Department of Computer Science had been retired a year or two earlier). There were two C compilers on the system, Ken Harrenstien's kcc, and Steve Johnson's pcc, the latter ported to TOPS-20 by my late friend Jay Lepreau (1952--2008). pcc was a straightforward port intended to make C programming, and porting of C software, fairly easy on the PDP-10, but without addressing many of the architectural features of that CPU. kcc was written by Ken Harrenstien from scratch, and designed explicitly for support of the PDP-10 architecture. In particular, it included an O/S system call interface (the JSYS instruction), and support for pointers to all byte sizes from 1 to 36. Normal addressing on the PDP-10 is by word, with an 18-bit address space. Thus, two 18-bit fields fit in a 36-bit word, ideally suited for Lisp's CAR and CDR (contents of address/decrement register, used for first and rest addressing of lists). However, PDP-10 byte pointers encode the byte size and offset in the second half of a word. Pointer words could contain an indirect bit, which caused the CPU to automatically load a memory word at that address, and repeat if that word was found to be an indirect pointer. That processing was handled by the LOAD instructions, so it worked for all programming languages. Characters on the ten-or-so different PDP-10 operating systems were normally 7-bit ASCII, stored left to right in a word, with the right-most low-order bit set to 0, UNLESS the word was intended to be a 5-decimal-digit line number, in which case, that bit was set to 1. Compilers and some other tools ignored line-number words. As the need to communicate with other systems with 8-, 16-, and 32-bit words grew, we had to accommodate files with 8-bit characters, which could be stored as four left-adjusted characters with 4 rightmost zero bits, or handled as 9 consecutive 8-bit characters in two adjacent 36-bit words. That was convenient for binary file transfer, but I don't recall ever seeing 9-bit characters used for text files. By contrast, on the contemporary 36-bit Univac 11xx systems running EXEC-8, the O/S was extended from 6 six-bit Fieldata chararacters per word to 9-bit extended ASCII (and ISO 8859-n Latin-n) characters: the reason was that the Univac CPU had quarterword access instructions, but not arbitrary byte-size instructions like the PDP-10. I don't think that there ever was a C compiler on those Univac systems. On the PDP-10, memory locations 0--15 are mapped to machine registers of those numbers: short loops could be copied into those locations and would then run about 3x faster, if there weren't too many memory references. Register 0 was not hardwired to a zero value, so dereferencing a NULL pointer could return any address, and could even be legitimate in some code. The kcc documentation reports: In kcc, the C fopen() call second argument was extended with extra flag letters: As the PDP-10 evolved, addressing was extended from 18 bits to 22 bits, and kcc had support for such extended addresses. Inside the kcc compiler, That design choice meant that the common assumption that a 32-bit word holds 4 characters remained true on the PDP-10. The _KCCtype_charN types could have N from 1 to 36. The case N = 6 was special: it handled the SIXBIT character representation used by compilers, linkers, and the O/S to encode external function names mapped to a 6-bit character set unique to the PDP-10, allowing 6-character unique names for symbols. I didn't readily find documentation of kcc features on the Web, so for those who would like to learn more about support of C and Unix code on the PDP-10, I created this FTP/Web site today: http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/kcc ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/kcc It supplies several *.doc files; the user.doc file is likely the one of most interest for this discussion. Getting C onto TOP-20 was hugely important for us, because it gave us access to many Unix tools (I was the first to port Brian Kernighan's awk language to the PDP-10, and also to the VAX VMS native C compiler), and eased the transition from TOPS-20 to Unix that began for our users about 1984, and continued until our complete move in summer 1991, when we retired our last VAX VMS systems. Finally, here is a pointer to a document that I wrote about that transition: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/reports/1987/t20unix.pdf P.S. I'll be happy to entertain further questions about these two C compilers on the PDP-10, offline if you prefer, or on this list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------