[TUHS] Any Interdata war stories?

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 12:26 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Yes, that was one of the RTS compilers for the NU machine.  John Romkey
> may have done it, as he was the primary person behind PCIP, but I can not
> claim I remember who did the 8086 backend.  IIRC Jack Test did the 68K
> backend.  The RTS crew had the NU machine and NU bus that went with it.
>  Very tean project Neat project.  Similar idea, in fact to what CMU was
> doing with the Intel Mutlibus called the distributed front end (we had
> started with LSI-11 and cost reduced it to 8086 on a Intel Multibus).  Andy
> Bechtolsheim would take with him to Stanford and rework with a 68K which
> became the Stanford Network Terminal - which used the RTS's C compilers.
>  It's all very mixed up. [ Don't tell me there was not an open source
> culture back in the old days by the way].
>
> Anyway the MIT RTS foilks made hardware and PCC back ends for the 68K,
> Z8000 and 8086.  I believe that each had separate assemblers, tjt who
> sometimes reads this list might know more, as he wrote the 68K assembler.
> IIRC they had a common linker which is was rewrite/extension to the
> original V7 linker or maybe the 4.1 linker.
>
> Anyone with a V7 license could get it.   If you had a PC license you get
> get the source to Romkey's PCIP.   If you did not a license, you could only
> get a binary kit.
> ᐧ
>
> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:59 PM Rich Salz <rich.salz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 1:00 PM Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>>
>>> * IP/TCP for DOS (though this was an independent thing, done at MIT,
>>> the licensing material for this product, IIRC, included some kind of
>>> unix permission that confused me at the time, but it may have just
>>> been lawyering to CYA rather than including anything).
>>>
>>
>> The PC/IP software from MIT included a port of the "Portable C Compiler"
>> to generate 8086-era code. It ran on a Unix machine and built binaries that
>> you downloaded to the PC. So you need an ATT source license to get the full
>> PCIP dev kit.
>>
>
Yea. The MIT compiler was also shipped with Venix/86

Warner
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