[TUHS] History of non-Bell C compilers?

[Marc Rochkind]

Since it came up in this thread, here's my review of Coherent in BYTE
Magazine (1985):

https://www.mrochkind.com/mrochkind/docs/Byte-Pick-Coherent-Theos.pdf

Marc

On Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 11:13 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 4:14 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C
> > compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at
> Bell.
> > Especially for x86.  Anyone have tales?
> > Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX?
>
> An unusual one would be the “revenue bomb” compiler that Charles Simonyi
> and Richard Brodie did at Microsoft in 1981.
>
> This compiler was intended to provided a uniform environment for the
> menagerie of 8 and 16-bit computers of the era. It compiled to a byte code
> which executed through a small interpreter. This by itself was hardly new
> of course, but it had some unique features. It generated code in overlays,
> so that it could run a code base larger than 64KB (but it defined only one
> data segment). It also defined a small set of “system” commands, that
> allowed for uniform I/O. I still have the implementation spec for that
> interpreter somewhere.
>
> This compiler was used for the first versions of Multiplan and Word, and
> my understanding is that the byte code engine was later re-used in Visual
> Basic. I think the compiler also had a Xenix port, maybe it even was Xenix
> native (and at this time, Xenix would still essentially have been V7).
>
> I am not sure to what extent this compiler was independent of the Bell
> compilers. It could well be that it was based on PCC, Microsoft was a Unix
> licensee after all and at the time busy doing ports. On the other hand,
> Charles Simonyi would certainly have been capable of creating his own from
> scratch. I do know that this compiler preceded Lattice C, the latter of
> which was distributed by Microsoft as Microsoft C 1.0.
>
> Maybe others know more about this Simonyi/Brodie compiler?
>
> Paul
>
> Notes:
> http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htm
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/appdev/story/0%2C10801%2C76413%2C00.html
> http://seefigure1.com/images/xenix/xenix-timeline.jpg



-- 
*My new email address is mrochkind at gmail.com <mrochkind at gmail.com>*
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