[Simh] pdp11 and unix

[Bill Cunningham]

I didn't know that B had been around so much. I then was /not/ designed for working with UNIX specifically?
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Clem Cole 
  To: Eric Smith 
  Cc: simh at trailing-edge.com 
  Sent: Friday, February 26, 2016 7:24 PM
  Subject: Re: [Simh] pdp11 and unix




  On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 6:43 PM, Eric Smith <esmithmail at gmail.com> wrote:

    It would be interesting to know how they went from B to C .. but once
    they had a higher level language (C .. well, higher level compared to
    the assembler), things would become much easier.


  ​Dennis described it all in one of his papers.   NB was written in B.  C morphed into being so as he said, there was never really a "C" compiler from scratch.   At one point, they realized the language had diverged enough to call it something else.


  Also, as Doug has pointed out either here or on the TUHS list, there was an early parser in TMG - which I believe spit out B at that point.   Yacc and Lex do not appear until later in the cycle. 


  The point is that the kernel and the tools "matured" as time went on.   At some point Dennis would collect up tools that people had and pick up the current state of the kernel and "release" was come out. So it was a ephemeral thing, not a big formal process we think of today with release candidates et al.    The bad news for us trying to pick through the history, is that it means in some cases we really do not have an established date of references point.   Warren has done yeoman's work to try to help establish such a timeline and probably has the most definitive track of what was what - but in some cases it was hazy and frankly the intermediate codes have been lost.


  Clem




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