[Simh] 101 Basic Games for RSTS/E (was Re: PDP11 on Simh for public access)

[Clem Cole]

below.. at bit off topic from simulators .... sorry

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 3:35 PM, Hunter Goatley <goathunter at goatley.com>
wrote:

> On 1/26/2018 2:22 PM, Timothe Litt wrote:
>
>>
>> BLISS would have done better in the outside world, except for the
>> DECision to price it higher than the market would bear.
>>
>
> Indeed! I was fortunate to get access to BLISS in college thanks to DEC's
> CSLG program, but it was their second-most expensive compiler license
> (after Ada), so virtually no one outside of DEC used it. When they
> originally released Alpha, they weren't planning to make the BLISS compiler
> available, but I and others worked to try to get DEC to change that. As I'm
> sure you know, in the end, they released it with a free license for both
> VAX and Alpha (and Itanium), but it was far too late for most people to
> have any interest in adopting it. I still do some BLISS coding, but I'm one
> of the few that I know of still doing it.


​Yup it was hard to for $5K / cpu to compete with $100 plus you got the
sources and could run it on any system - - certainly for any university.
And what DEC failed to understand was both the power of the new
microprocessors and that university hacker types would want to mess with
the compiler itself.

Tim - while I agree BLISS at the time was a more complete/better language
--- the difference in the quality of the code that they generated was night
and day - assuming you have made it self hosting etc... but ..... I have
also wondered if "free" would have been good enough though.   Access to the
sources so you could retarget it was a huge thing that helped C spread.  In
my own case, in the summer of 1979 when we go the experimental parts at
Tektronix that would later become the 68000, I wanted/needed an HLL to mess
with it.   What did I do? I hacked on the Ritchie C compiler and made a
crude backend -- good enough for an OS guy to do his work.

A year or so after that, when we did the TCP implementation, we needed a
HLL for our Vax (running VMS).  I did manage to get Tek to buy a BLISS
license for it.   But I remember all of us be amazed that DEC was trying to
charge so much for it.

Clem
ᐧ
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