[TUHS] changes in C compilers

[John P. Linderman]

*Ted took fsck back to Summit & MH*

I got my introduction to UNIX in '73 or '74, when the group running the
11/45 in Piscataway found out I came into work before 6am. UNIX was so
unstable back then that it had to be rebooted every day, to contain file
system corruption. A 6 am reboot went pretty much unnoticed. I could swear
we ran something very like fsck after each reboot. In particular, I recall
the **gok** diagnostic when the type of an inode wasn't anything
recognizable. Whatever we ran, I'm sure it continued to evolve.


On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 3:58 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Aug 25, 2018 at 2:38 PM <arnold at skeeve.com> wrote:
>
>> The APS work started in the summer of 1979. See
>> http://www.eprg.org/papers/202paper.pdf
>> and see some of the other stuff at
>> http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/index.html.
>>
>> I think that's after V7 was released.
>>
> Ok, so that was clearly the first ditroff.
>
> Typesetter C *must have been the original troff release* which was
> separate from V6; but I don't remember what all was in the release.
>  Looking at the v6 distribution tape I have, the assembler versions of roff
> and nroff was there; but not troff.   V7 clearly shows the original troff
> in the sources.
>
>
> The order I remember is this ... V5, V6, Patches, Typesetter C, TS, V7
> ...   although TS and Typesetter might be switched but I know we got
> Typesetter C before we got V7.    Ted brought TS to us (in EE) and I
> thought that had the new compiler.   CS got TS from us in EE.    But
> somebody at CMU had wanted troff because we had the XGP in CS that we drive
> with Scribe (I want to say that was EE but I don't remember who was
> involved).   So I have memory of somebody hacking on the compiler at some
> point.  The POR (which if ever came to bear at CMU was after I left) was
> some type of hacking on troff to support the XGP.  Given the time Aharon
> points out, it might have been direct support it or it might have been
> something like vcat - I was not involved.   Klone might remember more of
> that.
>
> Clearly from the time, ditroff did not yet exist.   The more I think about
> it, Brian K actually might know some of the story.  Scribe was Brian Reid's
> PhD Thesis and Brian K was on Reid's committee at the time and I'm guessing
> could somehow have been mixed up.
>
> FWIW: Compiler hacking at CMU stands out in my mind because of the 11/40e
> had CSAV/CRET instructions.  The CS versions of the compilers generated
> code using that, because they had 11/40e with CMU WCS options.  The rest of
> us in EE, BioMed, Mellon Institute etc were running on 11/34's or 11/34A
> which could not handle those binaries (no WCS).   So I personally spent
> time tracking the CS versions of the compiler and bringing things to EE,
> trying to keep thing clean.  That was one of my jobs at the time.
>
> That's fairly sure of the order, because we had Typesetter C at CMU in the
> Summer '78 when were we negotiating the 'university' commercial V7 license
> with Al Arms [which I was personally mixed up -- the finally
> ruling/agreement was license one system as a commercial system at the $20K
> fee and a university, could then use UNIX for back office and commercial
> style uses like Industry.  Al did not require the $5K second CPU stuff from
> the Universities, if they got a single $20K license; everyone was happy -
> details off list or another thread if you want them; although I will say
> CMU was first in early '79, followed by Case in late 1979].
>
> So again, I try to date by things I know are fixed in time and then work
> from there.   As Dan points out the cross pollination was high in those
> days and it was not just from the labs to the Universities.  For instance,
> Ted took fsck back to Summit & MH, as well as a number of other tools
> (although I think that one had the longest reach).   Noel has mentioned
> similar stories from MIT.  Chesson brought all the networking stuff from
> UoI and we saw some of it in datakit (an earlier version of his mpx code
> for V7 he did as a grad student).   You get the idea....
>
> Clem
>
>
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