19 Jun
2021
19 Jun
'21
7:57 p.m.
From: Henry Bent
From what I can gather the only way to reasonably
examine the
disassembly of a program in the early days of Unix was adb. Is this
true? Was there a way to easily produce a full disassembly?
'adb' is quite late. We had it on the PWB1 (V6 enhanced, basically) system at
MIT, so its roots lie before V7. (Every time I run across people who think V7
is early, I go into 'get off my lawn' mode.)
The first thing I know of that could disassemble PDP-11 code on Unix was 'db',
which dates back to V1:
https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man1/db.1
It wasn't optimal for doing disassembly, because it was non-trivial to
dump an entire object file as assembler source - but it could be done.
Later (V5 era) there was something called 'cdb', which was 'db' with
extensions to make it useful for debugging code whose source was in C:
https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man1/cdb.1
There were other non-Unix disassembler (such as DDT), also.
Noel
19 Jun
19 Jun
8:40 p.m.
New subject: Disassemblers
On Sat, Jun 19, 2021 at 2:25 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
'adb' is quite late. We had it on the PWB1
(V6 enhanced, basically) system
at
MIT, so its roots lie before V7.
Yeah, it's in the PWB1 source tree. FWIW: Bourne wrote it ( and it is
written in his unique 'BourneGOL' C macro dialect) which (I think) makes
it a PITA to modify. Later UCB versions for the Vax removed Steve's
macros. So it has some sorts of roots in Research, and most of the world
did not get to see it until V7 appeared.
(Every time I run across people who think V7 is early,
I go into 'get off
my lawn' mode.)
Amen.
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