[Simh] pdp11 and unix

[Clem Cole]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 8:28 PM, Will Senn <will.senn at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, they didn't use DEC's assembler, but they used GE's?


​Will,

It is not unlike what you are doing today.   You have a Mac with a rich
environment and use it to support your tests and experiments on the PDP-11.
   The GE 635 was a system they had access too that was richer than the
what they had from DEC, just as you have your Mac.   It had the tools Ken
needed - an editor, and an assembler, and some created post-processors.
 So Ken used what they had and what he was comfortable using.   As was
pointed out earlier, he wanted to write a Fortran compiler and created B.

Once it was self hosting, then of course, they started to switch to itself.
  But again, it was an evolution.

What I found interesting was how long it took before B really moved to Unix
and even then, assembler was the language of choice for many/most of the
early utilities.   Until the PDP-11 and a really stable C with a "good
enough" compiler, does the switch begin to occur.

You'll have to ask Doug or Ken himself, but when I asked Dennis about it
one time, he said that it was not really a specific thing.  They were
computer scientists and of course knew and wanted to use HLL's but they
also had things to get done.  It always had impressed me at how practice
the team really was.   Somebody recognized a problem and solved it.

BTW: When I was a young engineer, there was a term for this idea - it was
called the "next bench."   (I worked for an electronics firm so people had
benches not desks).  But the idea was sane - it said look at the engineer
in the next bench - if you use what you have and can build something to
help solve the problem they are having, chances are someone else has the
same problem and will want that same solution.

I've always thought of UNIX has the ultimate "next bench" both inside and
out of Bell System. You build up from what is there and collect together
the "tools" we need and can use.

Clem


Clem
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/attachments/20160226/a9e09be1/attachment.html>