Re: [TUHS] b remnants? - TUHS

15 Oct 2011

I didn't see it as immeditaly obvious on slackware 1.0 ... or SLS .. it very
well may have been some addon or something somehwere....

If anyone knew it's filename that'd go a long long way! :)

-----Original Message-----
From: Derrik Walker [mailto:lorddoomicus@mac.com]
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 12:36 PM
To: Gregg Levine
Cc: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] b remnants?

On Oct 14, 2011, at 11:53 AM, Gregg Levine &lt;gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

...
  On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Derrik Walker
&lt;lorddoomicus(a)mac.com&gt; wrote:
...
  > Many, many eons ago, in the early
'90's, there was an implementation of B
...
  > for Linux ( I believe it was written in C,
ironically enough ).  I think it
...
  > was part of a bigger collection of
"ancient" software for Linux that use to
...
  > be around in the early Slackware days.
 >
 > Alas, I have searched for it in the recent past, as I was thinking about
 > porting it to OS X for kicks, but it seems to have vanished.
 >
 > Having an B, implemented in a modern language for a modern OS would be cool.
...

 Hello!
 How early a time period for the Slackware Linux group? (Which is what
 I run.) There's a repository of older distributions on the Ibib site,
 and a more comprehensive one situated on a mirror in the UK. 
It would have been around '92 or '93, back when Slackware really only
provided a very basic boot system, gcc, some fancy scripts, and a crap load
of tarballs to compile everything.  I'm not even sure it was part of the
Slackware collection, it might have been something someone added to the
server - I didn't build that computer.

It was an experimental system at CSU, where I was going to school at the
time - and the first actually Linux computer I ever had an account on.  One
of the older professors had a bunch of B code he got from someplace and put
the compiler on there to see if he could get it to build.  I remember he
also put f2c on there too as he had a tape full of Fortran code he wanted to
compile.

But, for all I know, he may have written the B compiler himself, but I seem
to remember him telling me about this collection of ancient software for
Linux that someone else had written, and he had gotten it up and running on
the experimental Linux system.  Just not sure how faulty my memory is.  I
just remember looking at B, and asking why he just doesn't covert it to C?

Funny thing was, some of the younger professors were complaining saying the
preferred their "REAL UNIX".

Unfortunately, he as long since retired.  And that Computer was retired when
they moved the main Student system from HPUX to Redhat in the late '90's.

- Derrik