[TUHS] Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

[John Levine]

I thought Dennis said he didn’t the work on the 635 but you’re right, C was mostly on the Pdp-11 and then targeted back to the 635.

Please consider the environment before reading this message.
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com 

> On Mar 5, 2025, at 23:36, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 5, 2025 at 11:11 PM John Levine <johnl at taugh.com> wrote:
>>> snip
>>> And as for C: It was born on a 16-bit word system that expected 16-bit
>>> aligned words, replacing B, a language with just the word datatype, on
>>> a system with a 32KB (or less) user space, by people who had just come
>>> from a project where waiting for working production PL/I compiler had
>>> been a major headache, and generally suffered from "second system
>>> syndrome" bloat.
>> 
>> I believe the earliest versions of C were on a GE 635, a word addressed
>> machine comparable to a PDP-10.  But it moved to a PDP-11 soon enough
>> where the byte and word addresses motivated the datatypes that turned
>> B into C.
> 
> This is a startling claim that I have never heard before. Can you cite
> a source for this?
> 
> The history as recounted in Dennis Ritchie's paper on the history of C
> (https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist.pdf) is
> that the initial bootstrapping of PDP-7 Unix was done by
> cross-assembling on a GE-635, with paper-tape hand carried to the PDP.
> B appears to have been an invention that began life on the PDP-7 and
> was subsequently ported to the PDP-11. But C did not appear until they
> were solidly on the PDP-11, and was developed on that machine. The
> earliest connections to other machines were Dennis Ritchie
> constructing a cross-compiler for B that ran on the PDP-7; as he
> described it:
> 
> |The most ambitious enterprise I undertook was a genuine cross-compiler
> |that translated B to GE-635 machine instructions, not threaded code. It was
> |a small tour de force: a full B compiler, written in its own language and
> |generating code for a 36-bit mainframe, that ran on an 18-bit machine with
> |4K words of user address space.
> 
> C was later ported to GE-635 and IBM 370, but there's no indication
> it was created on the GE-635.
> 
>        - Dan C
>