18 Sep
2017
18 Sep
'17
9:30 p.m.
On 9/17/2017 10:34 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
9 bits would work - and still, waste 4 bits of the
36-bit word ... any
code carried over from elsewhere would never use the 9th bit unless you
know of stuff that does?
And yup, I remember KLH, not personally, but as the KLH-10 author :)
On 2017-09-17 18:33, Arthur Krewat
<krewat(a)kilonet.net> wrote:
I for one would be VERY interested. It would be an interesting exercise
to try it out on a SIMH emulator.
Was there ever a UNIX or even the thought of
porting one to a PDP-10?
Definitely a thought. An attempt was started on NetBSD for the PDP-10,
and it sortof got halfway of getting into single-user, but I'm not
sure if the person who worked on it just got distracted, or if he hit
problems that were really hard to solve. I certainly know the person,
and can find out more if people really are interested.
8-bit bytes
would have been a wasteful exercise, but you never know.
(losing 4 bits of every 36-bit word)
Uh... Why 8 bit bytes? That way lies madness. There exists a really
good C compiler for TOPS-20 - KCC. It uses 9 bits per byte. Works like
a charm, except when some people write portable code that is not so
portable. ;-)
KCC was written by KLH, unless I remember wrong. Same guy who also
wrote the KLH-10 emulator.