19 Jun
2021
19 Jun
'21
6:59 p.m.
On Sat, Jun 19, 2021 at 12:33 PM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Wait, so it was easier to write an emulator for a
PDP-10 binary than it
would have been to port BLISS to the PDP-11? Given the different word
sizes I would not have expected that.
BLISS-11 was (way) too big to run in the 64K address of the PDP-11 (even
separated I/D). Originally, it was a PDP-10 cross compiler and later moved
to the Vax. It generated much better code than the original Ritchie or
later Johnson compilers. The code generator/optimizer was famous
(literally the book on code optimization was written about it, called of
course: "The Design of an Optimizing Compiler"
<https://www.amazon.com/Design-Optimizing-Compiler-William-Allan/dp/0444001581>
by
Wulf and some of his students [ISBN 0444001581] - *a.k.a.* 'The Green Book'
worth reading BTW.
Later on, DEC's TLG tried at least twice that I know of to make it
self-hosting but gave up. Long story (and definitely a different thread) if
DEC has not screwed up the marketing of BLISS, I suspect it might have
given C a run for the money. But BLISS *vs*. C is a great example of
Cole's law that *Simple Economics always beats Sophisticated Architecture*
[and using Christensen's 'disruptive theory -- it gets better and supplants
the incombent].
Anyway, the compiler/code generator/linker for DEC Fortran-IV for RT-11,
RSX, and DOS-11 was written in BLISS-11. So for CU to retarget it for V6
they needed a PDP-10, which they did not have. So they wrote a simulator.
I remember when they gave a talk about it at Usenix, somebody asked them
how well Tenex ran on it.
Did they have a cover sheet or something equivalent
that they came with?
I'm having trouble imagining dealing with that much unindexed data on an
early system.
Not to my knowledge. Two things that I believe we need to do for the TUHS
archives to be even more meaningful is 1.) decode them from tp/ar -- even
if you read the tape, they are packed together in v5/v6 ar files which are
PDP-11 binary. 2.) Create an index of what is there.
I've thought about both things but have way too much on my plate to do it
myself.
Fascinating. Thank you as always for the insight.
Most welcome.
Clem
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