[Info-vax] Unix origins [was Re: [OT] Mentec, was: Re: OT: For MAC Lovers Only :-)]

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-10-15 22:22, Rich Alderson wrote:
> billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
>
>> Unix started on the PDP-11 and look at what it does today.
>
> No, it didn't.  It began life as a PDP-7 operating system which was only ported
> to the PDP-11 after a couple of rounds of development (in assembler).
>
> And so-called Version 1 Unix is the *third* version for the PDP-11, the first
> in C after a couple of turns in assembler.

Right.
Also, there is a big difference in Unix compared to the DEC PDP-11 OSes.
Unix was written (well, rewritten if you want to dig that deep) in C, 
which greatly helped porting to other architectures later. Even so, it 
was not a trivial job to port it back then.
Porting any DEC OS will be much worse. I don't expect it to be 
realistically possible.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol