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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-10-16 11:12, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> 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.

(Oh, not to mention that Unix was/is a lot less capable than the DEC 
OSes as well. Shared libraries for example is not something that Unix 
ever had on a PDP-11, and in fact took a very long time before any Unix 
at all had...)

	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