[COFF] Building OS from source in the olden days

[Clem Cole]

Mumble -- For IBM and DEC in the 60s and early 70s, the manufactures
distributed the (assembler) sources to the OS and we could (and did) build
from source but usually just built parts.   By the time of VMS and the
other minis, you tended to link together from modules, although many sites
did have sources (in assembler).

Remember, the target was the manufacturers HW so they were not giving away
much.   In the case of IBM, eventually, Amdahl started cloning and they got
a tad more closed, but by that time there were also many mainframe OS
flavors in wild.

That said, I think Burrough's gave away the ESPOL code for their systems,
but I never saw it; so I can not speak definitively there.

Unix was different.  Like Burrough's, it was heavily written in a systems
programming language.   To my knowledge, the 'concept' or 'porting' the OS
in it's entirety to a completely new ISA began with UNIX.

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:11 PM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> I'm currently reviewing a paper about Unix and Linux, and I made the
> comment that in the olden days the normal way to build an OS image for
> a big computer was from source.  Now I've been asked for a reference,
> and I can't find one!  Can anybody help?
>
> Greg
> --
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