[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[James Frew via TUHS]

I love the memories this list dredges up:

Back in The Day™ I was responsible for a CS student lab full of Teraks, 
and one of my first tasks was to get a serial line file transfer program 
running between the Teraks and the dept VAX. The program I inherited was 
written in PDP-11 assembler, needless to say completely uncommented. So 
I put my Lions-notes-level reading knowledge of assembler to work and 
commented it in C so I could understand it. The correspondence was 
almost 1:1 line-for-line. Pity the Terak didn't have a C compiler...

So I'm seconding John's suggestion. Seems like a perfectly do-able task 
for an LLM!

Cheers,
/Frew

On 2026-10-30 12:49 PM, John Levine via TUHS wrote:
> I do not ever recall a PDP-11 to C decompiler.  Compiling was painful enough.
> On the other hand, the instruction set was small and the translation from C
> to machine code was pretty straightforward so it might be interesting to set
> an LLM loose on it and see what you get.
>
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2026 at 11:31 AM John Foust via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
>>> I'm working on a fun project with Prof. Tim Teitelbaum of Cornell, who
>>> developed the Cornell Program Synthesizer, an early IDE that ran on the
>>> Terak computer.  We have an image of an 8" disk with the executables.
>>>
>>> Source has been lost, so I'd like to try to reconstruct it.  He believes
>>> the original was in an early C, circa 1979-1982, compiled on
>>> (I presume Unix) on maybe an 11/30 and them copied down to the
>>> Terak (like a PDP-11/03).
>>>
>>> Is there an existing tool chain that is good at reconstructing C from
>>> binaries of the C compiler of this era?