> From: Clem Cole
> 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
I decided to poke around in the 'MIT-CSR' dump, since that was the machine
the PC/IP project started on, to see what I could find. Hoo boy! What an
adventure!
In the PC/IP area, I found a 'c86' directory - but it was almost empty. It
did have a shell file, 'grab', which contained:
tftp -g $1 xx "PS:<Wayne>$1"
and a 'graball' file which called 'grab' for the list of compiler source
files. ('xx' was MIT-XX, the TOPS-20 main time-sharing machint of LCS.)
So I did a Web search for Wayne Gramlich (with whom I hadn't communicated in
many decades), and he popped right up. (Amazing thing, this Internet thingy.
Who'd have ever thought, back in the day, that it would turn into what it
did? Well, probably John Brunner, whom I (sadly) never met, who was there
before any of us.)
I took a chance, and called his number, and he was there, and we had a long
chat. He absolutely didn't do it, although he wrote the loader the project
used ('l68', the source for which I did find.) He's virtually certain Romkey
didn't (which would have been my guess too; Romkey was like a sophmore when
the project started). His best (_very_ faded) memory was that they started off
with a commercial compiler. (But see below.)
That leaves several mysteries. 1) Why would a commercial compiler not come
with a linker? 2) Why did people who wanted to work with the PC/IP source
need a Bell license?
I did some more poking, and the list of files for the 86 compiler, from
'graball':
trees.c optim.c pftn.c code.c local.c scan.c xdefs.c
table.c reader.c local2.c order.c match.c allo.c comm1.c
manifest mfile1 common macdefs mfile2 mac2defs
matched the file names from 'pcc', as given in "A Tour Through the Portable C
Compiler":
https://maibriz.de/unix/ultrix/_root/porttour.pdf
(in section "The Source Files"). So whether the 86 compiler was done at MIT
(by someone in RTS), or at a company, it was definitely a 'pcc' descendant.
(Possibly adding to the confusion, we had some other C compilers for various
ISA's in that project [building networking software for various
micro-computers], including an 8080 C compiler from Whitesmiths, Ltd, which I
have also found. It's possible that Wayne's vague memory of a commercial
compiler is of that one?)
I really should reach out to Romkey and Bridgham, to see what they remember.
Later today.
Whether the main motivation for keeping the compiler source on XX was i)
because disk space was short on CSR (we had only a hand-me-down pair of
CalComp Model 215 drives - capacity 58 Mbytes per drive!); ii) to prevent
version skew; or iii) because it was a commercial compiler, and we had to
protect the source (e.g. we didn't have the source to the 8080 compiler, only
the object modules), I have no idea.
> Anyway the MIT RTS folks 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.
There is an 'a86' directory on CSR, but it too is empty, except for a 'grab'
command file. That contains only:
tftp -g $1 xx "PS:<novick>$1"
I have no memory of who 'novick' might have been. A Web search for 'novick
mit lcs' didn' turn anything up. (I wonder if it might have been Carol
Novitsky; she was in our group at LCS, and I have a vague memory of her being
associated with the networking software for micro-computers project.)
Anyway, it probably doesn't matter; the c86 'grab' referred to Wayne, but he
didn't write c86; 'novick' might not have written a86.
Something else to ask Romkey and Bridgham about.
Noel
> From: Tom Lyon <pugs78(a)gmail.com>
>
> I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
> Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
I would love to hear more about the Interdata port and what
happened with it afterwards. Interdata seems to have disappeared
into the dustbin of history. And Unix on it apparently never
got out of Bell Labs; I don't think the code for it is in the
TUHS archives.
Was the Interdata system in use at Bell Labs for actual work once
the port was complete?
ISTR there was a meeting with Interdata about changes in the architecture
that Bell Labs wanted, that Interdata didn't want to make. What
was the full story?
Any other info would be welcome.
Thanks,
Arnold
> From: Arnold Robbins
> CCI made the Tahoe that 4.4 ran on, but I'm guessing it's a different
> architecture than the Interdata?
I think so. Almost all documentation on the Tahoe has been lost in the mists
of time (if ANYONE retains ANY hardcopies of ANY hardware documentation for
the Tahoe, PLEASE let me know), but I recently managed to work out a bit
about it from the instruction decoding/printing routines in the debuggers
from 4.3 BSD Tahoe:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/Power_6/32
and it seems to be fairly different from the Interdata:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/interdata/32bit/29-365R01_32BitRefMan_Jun74.pdf
Also, 'CCI' is 'Computer Consoles Incorporated', not "Concurrent Computer
Corp".
Noel
http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/writ/unix_origin_of_dot_filename.html says
> I'm not sure but I believe .. went in during the Version 2 rewrite
.. was there from the beginning. The v1 man page directory(v) says,
> By convention, the first two entries in each directory are for "." and "..".
Doug
> From: Rich Salz
> 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.
That makes sense. The 'MIT license' (about which Jerry Saltzer did a note for
the October-December 2020 issue of the 'IEEE Annals of the History of
Computing', available here:
https://www.mit.edu/~Saltzer/publications/MITLicense.pdf
and which mentions that it was initially done for the MIT PC/IP code) only
applied to the MIT-written applications, not a 'derived work' (to use the
intellectual property law 'term of art') based on Bell code.
Noel
Hi everyone,
I'm here with a Unix/Bell Labs history question at the suggestion of
BWK. I have a bit of a computing mystery on my hands...
_Conquest_ is an old game that apparently came to life in Bell Labs, but
no one seems to know anything more about it, including who the
author is.
The instructions for the game[1] contain the following text at the
bottom:
Amiga port by Bob Shimbo, orginal author unknown.
This game started life on a UNIX system at Bell Labs. It was ported
to CP/M 80 by a Scott Kamin. The manual was thrown together in an
afternoon. (Typos and corrections welcome).
You can reach me through Compuserve (UID 70260,231) or TBBS of
colorado (303)-693-4735.
The LHA archive for the Amiga was packaged in 1986.
I did get in touch with Bob Shimbo, but he writes:
You can imagine how long ago I did that port given I referenced my
Compuserve account. I don't recall where I found the code originally.
Sorry. We've been through 3 house moves since then and I don't know
where any references might have gotten to.
Scott Kamin--I found a reference to someone by his name in the CP/M
world in the 80s in New Jersey. (Internet Archive has lots of old
computer magazine scans and his name showed up in the classified ads.)
And a search turned up a snail mail address for someone in the right age
range living a few miles from the business listed in the ad. A Hail Mary
snail mail got no reply.
Does any of it ring a bell, by any chance? I've begun the work of
getting it to run on modern systems[2], and it would be great to be able
to include more history in the man page.
Cheers,
-Beej
[1] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/blob/master/instructions.txt
[2] https://github.com/beejjorgensen/conquest/
--
Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall
beej(a)beej.us https://beej.us/
Not UNIX, but adjacent...
With the permission of John Chambers, I'm sharing a scan of "S - A Language
and System for Data Analysis" by Richard Becker and John Chambers, January
1981.
Enjoy:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14ijVPw1DihydXFqTzj-wgl3C5LYEJdKX?us…
I was pleased to learn that the first port of S to UNIX was on the
Interdata 8/32, which I had my part in enabling.
Hi All.
The V7 ls.c ignores `.' and `..', unless given the -a option.
The V1 - V6 ls ignores all files that start with `.', unless given -a,
and this is the default for all modern versions of ls.
BWK tells me there's a story about the V7 behavior but he doesn't
remember what it is. Does anyone here know?
Thanks,
Arnold
Mark Seiden writes:
> the display updating code, as i recall, had a skull and crossbones on it
> i remember there was a bit of a kerfuffle when richard stallman introduced
> that code into gnu emacs
This is true. Gosling Emacs from 1984 and GNU Emacs 13 from 1985 both
have the skull and crossbones comment.
