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

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Fri Jul 16 05:28:32 AEST 2021


g/Synder/s//Snyder/ -- sigh....
ᐧ

On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:27 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> The 'second' C compiler was a PDP-10 and Honeywell (36-bit) target Alan
> Synder did for his MIT Thesis.
> It was originally targeted to ITS for the PDP-10, but it ran on Tops-20
> also.
>
> My >>memory<< is he used a 7-bit Character, ala SAIL, with 5 chars stored
> in a word with a bit leftover.
>
> You can check it out:  https://github.com/PDP-10/Snyder-C-compiler
>
> I believe that C compiler Nelson is talking about I believe is actually
> Synder's that Jay either ported from ITS  or WAITS.
>
> We had some form of the Synder compiler on the PDP-10's at CMU in the late
> 1970s.
> It was either Mike Accetta or Fil Aleva that wrote a program to read
> PDP-10 backup tapes, that I updated to deal with TOPS-20/TENEX 'dumper'
> format which was similar/only different.
>>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:03 PM Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> ======
>>
>> 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
>>
>
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