[TUHS] Early Internet work (Was: History of select(2))

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Mon Jan 30 12:30:37 AEST 2017


On Sun, Jan 29, 2017 at 09:19:48PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> That said, is you want a goos starting point the best C compiler for the
> 8080 was the Leor Zolman's "Brain Damaged Software" C -- aka BDS C.   Which
> he has put in the public Domain:   http://www.bdsoft.com/resources/bdsc.html

Oh, how I know that compiler.  Or knew it.  When I was a student and they 
had 30-40 people logged into the VAX 11/780, I said "screw this, it's too
slow" and I got $2000 Okidata CPM Z80 machine (why that one?  Because it
had an integrated printer and the screen had colors, wasn't B&W). 

CPM wasn't that great, I was used to BSD Unix, so I wrote a bunch of clones
of the unix commands like ls, cat, more, cp, rm, etc.  For those I used
assembler because I was trying like crazy to get each one to fit in one
sector of the floppy disk; that was faster to load and left more room on
the disk for other stuff.

Anyhoo, that BDS compiler was awesome.  Not as awesome as turbo pascal but
it wasn't pascal, if you know what I mean.

I did most of my school projects on that machine, wrote my on dial / terminal
program (why?  Because I could :), all of that in BDS C.

Anyone remember his non-standard standard I/O?



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