[TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[Norman Wilson]

Nelson H. F. Beebe:

  P.S. Jay was the first to get Steve Johnson's Portable C Compiler,
  pcc, to run on the 36-bit PDP-10, and once we had pcc, we began the
  move from writing utilities in Pascal and PDP-10 assembly language to
  doing them in C.

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How did that C implementation handle ASCII text on the DEC-10?
Were it a from-scratch UNIX port it might make sense to store
four eight- or nine-bit bytes to a word, but if (as I sense it
was) it was C running on TOPS-10 or TOPS-20, it would have had
to work comfortably with DEC's convention of five 7-bit characters
(plus a spare bit used by some programs as a flag).

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON