[Simh] Booting the vax750 simulator.

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Out of curiosity, I did a bit of Googling, and found a link to the following Digital Technical Journal article from 1992 that explains GEM in detail.  It also gives the biographies of a number of the key players involved with GEM – I wonder how many Clem still has sitting in his office these days.

http://www.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/macro/DEC/DTJ/DTJ808/DTJ808PF.PDF

Jason

From: Simh [mailto:simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Clem Cole
Sent: Tuesday, 7 July 2015 4:17 PM
To: Henry Bent
Cc: simh at trailing-edge.com; Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm
Subject: Re: [Simh] Booting the vax750 simulator.


On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Henry Bent <hbent at oberlin.edu<mailto:hbent at oberlin.edu>> wrote:
It appears that it comes with VAX C, which is part of the base Ultrix packages.

​That makes sense.   As I said, I'm would suspect it was driven by VAX Fortran project, but once that was done any of the DEC languages would have used it since GEM tried to be common for all.

GEM was an amazing project.   N front ends, Y backends.  A compiler suite designed to last for 20 years.   Needed to span a 16 to 64 bits, parallel, vectorization etc.    N included Fortran, Bliss, C, C++, Pascal, ​Cobol, Ada, Basic and I believe others now forgotten.   Y was PDP-11, Vax, MIPS, Alpha, Itanium, x86, 68K, Prism and again probably others which I have forgotten.

Clem

BTW:  Intel owns all of the IP and the few members of the GEM team that have not yet retired (we will lose Mr. Fortran on July 15).   IMO:  Sadly, guess which compiler technology Intel uses, something developed locally to benchmark the x86 or GEM?   As Rich Grove (father of GEM) once said to me, the DEC DNA lives, and has slowly been injected into the Intel technology.

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