[TUHS] lost ports

[Clem Cole]

​I also left out....

E.) GEM tools ran on VMS, Ultrix, Mica, OSF/1, Tru64, Mac OSx, NT/4 and
later Windows version up too and now Win10​

And I was just reminded that there was a 68K back-end done for it also that
terminal folks used, although I'm not sure I ever saw it.

Ron - for whatever its worth, the whole BLISS vs C is different history
both outside and inside of DEC [which some of lived and I'll not repeat it
here].   But it is sadly miss represented.   I'm a C programmer and while I
learned BLISS before C, I certainly prefer C to BLISS as do many of my
peers - even heavy, heavy BLISS hackers I know.

You should know that the compiler team was definitely BLISS based, as was
the VMS group, but once Streams I/O was added to VMS and the C compiler
introduced, most VMS customers left RMS I/O; while continuing to use
FORTRAN as the primary VMS end-user language, BLISS was less so, C and
Pascal quickly became more popular.   Even at DEC, C took off, particularly
in the HW teams if for no other reason than you could hire C programmers
from Universities and you had to teach them BLISS.

Clem

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 11:01 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> ​below...​
>
> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 4:24 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> but another true story: I visited DEC in 2000 or so, as LANL was about to
>> spend about $120M on an Alpha system. The question came up about the SRM
>> firmware for Alpha. As it was described to me, it was written in BLISS and
>> the only machine left that could build it was an 11/750, "somewhere in the
>> basement, man, we haven't turned that thing on in years". I suspect there's
>> a lot of these containing oxide oersteds of interest.
>
>
> ​Cute story but not true [and I was @ DEC working Alpha at that time].
> Some facts:
>
> A.) The SRM firmware was in C primary and Assembler and used >>UNIX<<
> tools not VMS tools for development
> B.) The GEM compiler (which still exists and still being developed by
> VMSI) had front ends for at least (which I remember):   BLISS, C, PL/1,
> Pascal, ADA, FORTRAN​, Cobol, RPG and a few others (I'll try to ask if I
> see any of the old GEM guys in the Cafe' in the next few hours - they are
> dying off BTW - but that's a different story).
> C.) The GEM compiler has backends for,  Vax, Galaxy, MIPS, Alpha, x86
> (32bit), ia64, INTEL*64 (post DEC/Compaq/HP) and I believe also ARM (I'll
> need to ask if the VMSI folks come to lunch on Friday).
> D.) Alpha's ran UNIX before they ran VMS BTW.  The HW debug was all UNIX.
>
> Clem
>
>
>
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