I recall a couple of editors and some tools were kicking around written in B.  I would check the GCOS archives, as I believe that for a long time, B was a popular systems programming language for that OS target.  B might have been moved to Multics, but I have no memory of seeing it.   IIRC, most system programming there was on in its powerful PL/1 dialect or a Fortran/often with a preprocessor like MORTRAN or RatFor, which I did see. 

Interestingly, I also have no memory of a B implementation for the PDP-10, which like GE/Honeywell systems, was 36-bit, word addressed. I used BLISS and SAIL on those, if not the assembler.

FWIW: Besides C, B also begat two other languages Eh and Zed, both at Waterloo,  Eh I believe, was what the original Thoth system was written, although it might have had some utilities in B; you have to ask someone like Mike Malcom.  Since many/most of the 1970s mini's and later micro's, ISAs were byte addressed, the word nature of B (and the fact that the source to Ritchie C compiler came with UNIX), is probably what caused it to have a more limited life.
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On Wed, Jun 7, 2023 at 6:14 AM Sebastien F4GRX <f4grx@f4grx.net> wrote:
Hello everyone,

this is my first post on this list.


After looking at the archives for this mailing list, I have seen that
the B language has been discussed several times already.

After viewing Ken Thompson's interview by Brian Kernighan at VCF East
2019, I became interested in the B language, as it seemed full-featured
for system programming, close to C, and simple enough to write a parser
for it without a code generation tool.

So for fun and self-education, I am now writing a (or yet another) B
compiler, in C, after reading Jack Crenshaw's "Let's build a compiler"
documentation ( https://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/ )

Here it is: https://git.sr.ht/~f4grx/bpars

It is now starting to generate code for the 68hc11 8-bit platform. It
can also generate C code.


I have written some test programs, found some B examples, but I thought
it would be great to use my compiler with actual B software.

Of course, B was a "transition" language, that did not have a continued
use as soon as it evolved into C. so if any software remains, it will be
quite hard to find.

And here is my question, is any of you aware of original B source code
archives? or are in touch with people that would know?


In particular, I read on this document written by Dennis Ritchie:
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

 > After the TMG version of B was working, Thompson rewrote B in itself
(a bootstrapping step).


I have also read that the YACC tool was initially written in B.

There might be other historical B sources that I am not aware of.


Do you know if any of this code has survived to this day? Where could I
find more information about this?


Thank you very much,

Sebastien Lorquet (F4GRX)