[TUHS] PC/IP

[Clem Cole]

Thank you, Tom, for the definitive answers to much of this.  I remembered
that the Z8000 was mixed up in that mess, but it was missing from Al's Trix
tape.  Do you know if a Z8000 back end or set of support tools was ever
built, and if so, does anyone know if they survived?  It does look like Al
has 8086 [Terman compiler].  68K (of a few flavors) and an NS16032
(author's unknown).  One of the tools you mentioned from MIT seems to have
survived, although Dennis and I saved the official UNIX Circuit Design
System release in the mid-1990s. Warren has had that TUHS archives ever
since, but I'm not I ever saw you tools other than things like you 68K
assembler, and I guess is was our fiiend Wayne that wrote the linker (which
until this thread I did not now).

BTW: Again, it proves how interwoven the people and tech (i.e., open source
culture) were in the 1970s; i.e., it's not a new thing.  The PDPs were
running the Stanford Circuit Design System (SUDS) and the 11's often
at USCD.  The people came and went.   For instance,the former Wayne was a
year ahead of me at CMU before he headed to MIT for a Master's and PhD,
ᐧ

On Fri, May 2, 2025 at 10:57 AM Tom Teixeira <tjteixeira at earthlink.net>
wrote:

> On 5/1/25 12:20 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
> > On 4/30/25 8:38 PM, Jonathan Gray wrote:
> >> Chris was part of the Nu project.
> >>
> >> "Was a principal developer of the NuMachine"
> >>
> >> "developed a family of portable C compilers for the (then) newly
> >> available microprocessors. These compilers were widely distributed as
> >> the first C implementations for the x86 and 68K processors."
> >>
> >> https://people.csail.mit.edu/cjt/resume.html
> >
> > I found most of the yearly LCS reports have been digitized to DTIC
> > which answered a bunch of my questions about who was doing what at
> > that time
> >
> > I've archived them at http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/lcs/progress_reports
> >
> >
> >
> Some background, though the MIT LCS progress reports should cover much
> of this. I won't attempt to put any dates.
>
> Chris Terman was one of the graduate students in the RTS group. Since
> VT-52 terminals were relatively scarce, he designed and built his own
> with a larger screen - something like 40 lines by maybe 120 or 132
> characters, called the "Termanal". I don't remember if it used an 8080
> to handle the control sequences in the data stream or something else.
>
> He then got interested in designing a terminal that could display bit
> map graphics, to be comparable to the graphics used on the Lisp Machines
> just being built by the MIT-AI lab. I had stumbled across one of the LCS
> progress reports that credits Professor Steve Ward and one of the
> undergraduate staff, Rae McClellan in assisting the design of this bit
> graph which was named the "Nu Terminal" (I don't think it was the "Nu
> Termanal"). This used an 8086. A couple of these were built. One of the
> undergraduate students, Jon Sieber, had been a member of an Explorer
> Post in Murray Hill where Dennis Ritchie was the advisor. Jon would
> regularly bring UNIX tapes from the Research Lab and included things
> like early versions of the Portable C Compiler and the Circuit Design
> Aids. Chris used the Circuit Design Aids to design wire-wrap boards for
> the Nu Terminal and the RTS lab got a semi-automatic wire wrap machine.
> Some students and staff took turns doing the actual wire wrapping. My
> contribution was writing some simple software that simulated a paper
> tape reader for the wire wrap machine.
>
> An undergraduate student, Mike Patrick, did his bachelor's thesis
> writing a table driven assembler and constructed tables for the 8086 and
> I think an 8080. Later there were drivers for the Zylog Z8000, the
> National Semiconductor NS16000 and the Motorola 68000. I contributed a
> small bit of code for doing optimal choice of short vs long branches (to
> branch to an address more than +/- 127 bytes, you had to branch around a
> longer jump instruction).
>
> Chris Terman did the work of modifying the Portable C Compiler to
> generate code for the 8086, the Z8000, NS16000 and MC68000. I think we
> may have built one machine with the Z8000, but quickly settled on using
> the MC68000, primarily because of the 32-bit support (one progress
> report says that Zenith was supposed to build multiple Z8000 based
> machines, but I don't remember those. The NS16000 had better memory
> management, but I don't think we ever actually received any CPU chips.
>
> Anyway, these compilers were what was distributed, and the MC68000
> compiler in particular was used by almost all the companies that came
> out the MC68000-based Unix machines. Apollo was a notable exception, but
> Apollo wrote their own operating system from scratch rather than Unix.
> Side note: Bill Poduska came to visit Steve Ward and before the visit
> Steve was all excited, but was disappointed that Bill was not going to
> use Unix.
>
> Before the RTS group used Unix, they had written a small timesharing
> system for the PDP-11/45 that was used in the 6.031 introductory
> computer science course taught by Mike Dertouzos. Chris was involved in
> maintaining that, though I think Steve Ward was probably the main
> implementor. Chris had also spent too many hours changing address
> jumpers on Unibus and other controllers as well as tweaking Unix mkconf
> files, and thought that while the 4BSD autoconfiguration was an
> improvement, there should be a better way. Chris and Steve designed the
> Nu bus, and the Nu Bus was used in the MC68000 boards. Eventually it was
> picked up by Apple.
>
> Chris was one of many students who took the Mead/Conway LSI design
> course and ended up abandoning his research on portable compilers in
> favor of simulating LSI designs. He was also a co-founder of Symbolics
> and designed the controller for their laser printer before returning to
> MIT as a Lecturer and sponsored research staff.
>
> There were also proposed follow-on software projects related to the Nu
> terminal. One was Trix. Steve Ward said he didn't know what an "ics"
> was, but Multics clearly had too many, and Unix had too few, hence Trix.
> Jack Test was hired to do a lot of the development. Wikipedia has a
> reasonable summary of Trix, as far as I remember, but I had left RTS to
> join Masscomp in late 1981/early 1982, and I know Jack Test was an early
> employee of Alliant Computer so he left Trix probably in 1982.
>
>
>
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