[TUHS] C from 1980 binaries

[John Levine via TUHS]

It appears that Wendt Alan via TUHS <smartasasackofhammers at gmail.com> said:
>Might be on a CS Department backup from that era?

I wasn't at Cornell in that era but I was at Yale and any backups we had
would at best be on uneadable 1/2" magtapes and more likely deep in a landfill
somewhere.

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.

R's,
John




>
>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?