On 29 December 2017 at 21:30, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:

On 12/29/17, Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> The Alpha was hot
> stuff for about nine months. Ran OSF/1 formerly DigitalUnix formerly
> OSF/1.

Digital UNIX for the VAX was indeed derived from OSF/1. The port to
Alpha was called Tru64 UNIX.

Tru64 UNIX was initially a pure 64-bit system, with no provision for
building or running 32-bit program images. This turned out to be a
mistake . DEC found out that a lot of ISVs had code that implicitly
"knew" that sizeof() a pointer was the same as sizeof(int) was the
same as 4 bytes. Tru64 was forced to implement a 32-bit compatibility
mode.

There was also a problem with the C compiler initially developed at
DECwest in Seattle. It supported ONLY ANSI standard C and issued
fatal errors for violations/extensions of the standard. We (DEC
mainstream compiler group) called it the Rush Limbaugh
compiler--extremely conservative, and you can't argue with it.

I'm curious about this. As far as I know the development of the released OS for the Alpha went this way:

(OSF/1 reference) -> (OSF/1 for MIPS) -> OSF/1 V[1.2, 2, 3.0] -> Digital UNIX [3.2, 4] -> Tru64[5]. Was there ever a branch of this for the VAX?

And was the frontend for the compiler for the Alpha not the same as for the DECstations? That had the -std options to switch between K&R, "compatibility," and pure ANSI. My DECstation isn't up right now but I believe its compiler under OSF/1 could even take the Sun compiler options, -Xc, -Xa, etc.

-Henry