[TUHS] PCC for the i386

[Clem Cole]

Yup, that was Steve Ward's folks in the MIT/RTS group - it was the NU
computer work.  John Siber did most of the compiler work (funny, Steve
Johnson and I were talking about some of that work last night at the UNIX50
party last night).  tjt wrote the 68K assembler ward's folks used.  I don't
remember where the Z8000 assembler came, but I'm petty sure that the Intel
assembler and some of the tools other John had brought back from his
summers in MH.

I think (but don't know for sure) the Intel 8086 assembler was done at AT&T
first.  IIRC it may have come out of Dale's group in Columbus.   I do know
Dale's group had done a Z80 C Compiler using the Ritchie Compiler at some
point in 1978 timeframe (and at one time I had, but can not seem to find
it, in my archives).

When Intel released the 386, I believe the AT&T 8086 assembler was updated
for the new 32 instructions; although who did that/where was done, I'm not
sure.

Steve is probably the best source for most of this as he managed the team
in Summit doing the different AT&T front and back ends when they tried to
centralize the compiler work for UNIX.

On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:48 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 10:31 AM Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> By the time of 4.2 the switch from the  Ritchie and Johnson compilers at
>> UCB had begun.  Remember the primary output of Rms at that point was emacs
>> and gcc.
>>
>> CSRG wanted the different backends for C.   ThAts it.  Besides the vax,
>> Rms had done 68000 and 386 back ends then.
>>
>> With the original system V, all of AT&T, Intel and IBM paid Interactive
>> Systems Corp (aka ISC) to port the System V/Vax code to a 386 ps/2 and an
>> Intel reference system that used an ISA bus.  This would be eventually
>> released in source at the 386 port from AT&T.   As part of the contract
>> summit supplied the compiler
>>
>> I know the AT&T assembler with it’s backwards syntax from Intel was done
>> before rms did his.  He was compatible with the summit assembler.  I don’t
>> remember who’s 386 backend came out first.  I think is was the summit
>> compiler but you needed a system v license which UCB did not have.
>>
>
> There's also a fair amount of work at MIT to do Intel code generation for
> 8086 (small mode) that was extended by Queens College London (I think, I
> gotta grab the tapes again) to do large mode. I've run into this looking
> for a compiler for the Venix source restoration project I've been tilting
> at. I found those based on a cryptic comment I found somewhere online about
> the tech behind Venix that wasn't from AT&T. I don't know if ISC started
> with them as a base or not, nor really how the MIT compilers came about,
> but they claim to be PCC based somehow. Don't know if this helps you on
> your quest... BTW, I found these when I found the latest pcc-restoration
> sources didn't have a working i86 backend anymore (there was once one for
> Minux, but when I built it I couldn't get it to generate sensible code at
> all).
>
> Warner
>
>
>> Clem
>>
>> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
>> quite.
>>
>> On Jul 11, 2019, at 8:50 AM, Jason Stevens <
>> jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
>>
>> That would make sense.   I was able to find some info on PCC2 here
>>
>> http://doc.cat-v.org/unix/unix-before-berkeley/
>>
>> I'm guessing along with the adoption of emacs the csrg must have been
>> further gnu synergy...  Or maybe PCC2 just wasn't available outside of the
>> labs?
>>
>> Or maybe by '88 gcc was already usurping many of the c compilers of the
>> era.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 11:37 PM +0800, "Clem cole" <clemc at ccc.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I believe the pcc/386 came out of Steve Johnson team at Summit with the
>>> PCC2 work.
>>>
>>> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not
>>> quite.
>>>
>>> On Jul 11, 2019, at 7:53 AM, Jason Stevens <
>>> jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Does anyone know where the 386 port from PCC came from?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> While trying to build a Tahoe userland for the i386, it seems that
>>> everything was built with GCC…
>>>
>>> Was there a PCC for the i386 around ’88-90?  It seems after the rapid
>>> demise of the Tahoe/Harris
>>>
>>> HCX-9 that the non Vax/HCX-9 platforms had moved to GCC?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Also anyone know any good test software for LIBC?  I’ve been tracing
>>> through some
>>>
>>> strange issues rebuilding LIBC from Tahoe, where I had to include some
>>> bits from
>>>
>>> Reno to get diropen to actually work.  I would imagine there ought to
>>> have been some
>>>
>>> platform exercise code to make sure things were actually working instead
>>> of say
>>>
>>> building as much as you can, and playing rogue for a few hours to make
>>> sure
>>>
>>> its stable enough.
>>>
>>>
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