I also left out....

E.) GEM tools ran on VMS, Ultrix, Mica, OSF/1, Tru64, Mac OSx, NT/4 and later Windows version up too and now Win10

And I was just reminded that there was a 68K back-end done for it also that terminal folks used, although I'm not sure I ever saw it.

Ron - for whatever its worth, the whole BLISS vs C is different history both outside and inside of DEC [which some of lived and I'll not repeat it here]. But it is sadly miss represented. I'm a C programmer and while I learned BLISS before C, I certainly prefer C to BLISS as do many of my peers - even heavy, heavy BLISS hackers I know.

You should know that the compiler team was definitely BLISS based, as was the VMS group, but once Streams I/O was added to VMS and the C compiler introduced, most VMS customers left RMS I/O; while continuing to use FORTRAN as the primary VMS end-user language, BLISS was less so, C and Pascal quickly became more popular. Even at DEC, C took off, particularly in the HW teams if for no other reason than you could hire C programmers from Universities and you had to teach them BLISS.

Clem

On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 11:01 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

below...

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 4:24 PM, ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
but another true story: I visited DEC in 2000 or so, as LANL was about to spend about $120M on an Alpha system. The question came up about the SRM firmware for Alpha. As it was described to me, it was written in BLISS and the only machine left that could build it was an 11/750, "somewhere in the basement, man, we haven't turned that thing on in years". I suspect there's a lot of these containing oxide oersteds of interest.

Cute story but not true [and I was @ DEC working Alpha at that time]. Some facts:

A.) The SRM firmware was in C primary and Assembler and used >>UNIX<< tools not VMS tools for development
B.) The GEM compiler (which still exists and still being developed by VMSI) had front ends for at least (which I remember): BLISS, C, PL/1, Pascal, ADA, FORTRAN, Cobol, RPG and a few others (I'll try to ask if I see any of the old GEM guys in the Cafe' in the next few hours - they are dying off BTW - but that's a different story).
C.) The GEM compiler has backends for, Vax, Galaxy, MIPS, Alpha, x86 (32bit), ia64, INTEL*64 (post DEC/Compaq/HP) and I believe also ARM (I'll need to ask if the VMSI folks come to lunch on Friday).
D.) Alpha's ran UNIX before they ran VMS BTW. The HW debug was all UNIX.

Clem