UNIX Arcana [was Re: Perl (or Unix vs. MS, actually) ]

Bayard R. Coolidge bayard at tds.net
Thu Aug 22 00:12:36 EDT 2002


bscott at ntisys.com asked:

>>> was Unix ever developed on any of those?
(meaning the 12-bit PDP-8/PDP-12 architectures)

AFAIK, no. I believe that the original development was
on some PDP-11's (11/45's?) that Bell Labs had at the time.
Those, of course, are 16-bit machines. But, I don't ever
hearing about any "back-porting" to the PDP-8's. At the
time, it would have been a real PITA, because the I/O
architectures were totally different. Also, by the time
that UNIX was more or less working well enough to distribute
to its users, the PDP-8 was rapidly approaching end-of-life;
DEC had jumped through some really wierd hoops to get it
to address 128kb of memory, and it was clear that that was it.
The PDP-11s, on the other hand, could do that much fairly
easily and was obviously much more extendible. Much of the
development in the mid-70's was to meet some interesting
requirements that customers had voiced, and obviously some
of those customers were running UNIX.

HTH,

Bayard, who tried, but failed to find his old copy of the
RIM loader...



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