[Simh] pdp11 and unix

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On Sat, 27 Feb 2016 23:05:47 +0100
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> On 2016-02-27 20:46, Paul Koning wrote:
> >
> >> On Feb 27, 2016, at 2:36 PM, Bill Cunningham <billcun at suddenlink.net>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> Well that's certainly before ICs I think that was in the 1950s and it
> >> was some early calculators that killed slide rules.

Slide rule killing didn't really start rolling until the late 1970s IIRC.
Personally I still used one until the mid 80s but YMMV.

> What kind of "processor" were they using?

HP had their own proprietary processors for decades. They finally went to
ARM, native for some models and emulation under ARM for others.

I don't know enough about the TI line but later models used z80 and M68K. I
believe the latest model(s) runs on ARM.

> I'm not so sure there was real HLL before Adm. Hopper.

Yes, there was, see below.

> And no binary by Babbge. Do you have any links or anything from the '40s?
> >
> > HLL?  I was talking about assembler...  Anyway, I don't believe COBOL
> > was the first HLL, though it certainly was fairly early.
> 
> The first HLL ought to have been FORTRAN. Lisp might have been the 
> second, but I'm not entirely sure.

Yes, that seems to be the consensus. FORTRAN started in the mid 1950s,
COBOL was released in 1959, PL/I in 1962.

Although LISP was developed on IBM machines it wasn't an IBM product so I
don't remember the exact date but IIRC it was in the 1958/1959 timeframe,
so pretty much the same time as COBOL.