[TUHS] Re: Peter H. Salus comments (+32V)
Dennis Ritchie
dmr at plan9.bell-labs.com
Sun Oct 19 15:12:01 AEST 2003
Peter Salus is quoted as saying
> ...
> When the VAX was ``pre-announced,'' the Unix architects at Bell Labs had become
> disillusioned with DEC, they didn't like VMS and they thought that the VAX had
> an ``offensively fat instruction set.'' Anyway, Steve Johnson and Dennis
> Ritchie were working on their Unix port to the Interdata. (Which Steve referred
> to as the ``Intersnail.'')
We were far from disillusioned, either with the company
or the design; see my contemporary transcription of Ossanna's
notes of the preannouncement presentation.
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/vax.html
But it is true that our own attention was focussed on the Interdata
work at the time; not only was it underway, but for stretching
portability it looked useful to work on an architecture that
was Not "culturally compatible" with the PDP-11.
> So DEC approached Charlie Roberts at AT&T in Holmdel, NJ. Tom London, John
> Reiser and Ken Swanson were interested; they got a VAX in early 1978. In three
> months they ported Version 7 to the VAX. Roberts told me: ``We got the machine
> in January, they had it running in April, and by August it really worked.'' >>
and indeed left the Vax port to Reiser and London. (VMS
didn't figure into the equation.)
A later poster, nao, asked about London and Reiser's memo
about their work on what became 32V (TM-78-1353-4).
This seems to be in the company archives, but not in scanned form.
I've ordered a paper copy, but the mechanism sometimes
is a black hole.
Dennis
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