12 Mar
2024
12 Mar
'24
9:42 p.m.
On 11 Mar 2024, at 18:12, Paul Ruizendaal
<pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 4:14 PM Tom Lyon <pugs78 at gmail.com> wrote:
I was pointed to the book “Writing Solid Code”, Microsoft Press ISBN 1-55615-551-4. In the
foreword it says:
"The system we used to develop Multiplan was pretty sophisticated for PC development
in those days. We wrote the core product in C - most programs then were written in
assembly or Pascal. We did our editing and compilation on a PDP-11 running Unix. The C
code was compiled into p-code and downloaded to the target machines. We had to build
p-code interpreters for each microprocessor in use at that time. By the end of 1983, we
had interpreters working for the 8080/Z80, the 6502, the Z8000, the 68000, the 9900, and
the 8086.”
So the Simonyi compiler was Xenix/Unix native.
The specs for its p-code interpreter can be found here:
https://forums.atariage.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php…
https://forums.atariage.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php…
For no good reason, I've been wondering
about the early history of C
compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at Bell.
Especially for x86. Anyone have tales?
Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX?
An unusual one would be the “revenue bomb” compiler that Charles Simonyi and Richard
Brodie did at Microsoft in 1981.
[snip]
I think the compiler also had a Xenix port, maybe it even was Xenix native (and at this
time, Xenix would still essentially have been V7).