On 4/29/25 11:25 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU
machine. John Romkey may have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP, but I
can not claim I remember who did the 8086 backend. IIRC Jack Test did the 68K backend.
The RTS crew had the NU machine and NU bus that
went with it. Very tean project Neat project. Similar idea, in fact to what CMU was
doing with the Intel Mutlibus called the distributed
front end (we had started with LSI-11 and cost reduced it to 8086 on a Intel Multibus).
Andy Bechtolsheim would take with him to Stanford
and rework with a 68K which became the Stanford Network Terminal - which used the
RTS's C compilers. It's all very mixed up. [ Don't tell
me there was not an open source culture back in the old days by the way].
Anyway the MIT RTS foilks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K, Z8000 and 8086. I
believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who
sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K assembler. IIRC they had
a common linker which is was rewrite/extension to
the original V7 linker or maybe the 4.1 linker.
Anyone with a V7 license could get it. If you had a PC license you get get the source
to Romkey's PCIP. If you did not a license, you
could only get a binary kit.
I have an image of the "MIT Compiler Tape" with a bunch of different PCC ports
from a couple of different institutions.
On the Stanford side, SUMACC was a hack of the compiler to work with the Macintosh
I had the source for it at one point, but haven't been able to find it on any of my
backups.