Since it came up in this thread, here's my review of Coherent in BYTE Magazine (1985): https://www.mrochkind.com/mrochkind/docs/Byte-Pick-Coherent-Theos.pdf Marc On Mon, Mar 11, 2024 at 11:13 AM Paul Ruizendaal wrote: > On Thu, Mar 7, 2024, 4:14 PM Tom Lyon wrote: > > > For no good reason, I've been wondering about the early history of C > > compilers that were not derived from Ritchie, Johnson, and Snyder at > Bell. > > Especially for x86. Anyone have tales? > > Were any of those compilers ever used to port UNIX? > > An unusual one would be the “revenue bomb” compiler that Charles Simonyi > and Richard Brodie did at Microsoft in 1981. > > This compiler was intended to provided a uniform environment for the > menagerie of 8 and 16-bit computers of the era. It compiled to a byte code > which executed through a small interpreter. This by itself was hardly new > of course, but it had some unique features. It generated code in overlays, > so that it could run a code base larger than 64KB (but it defined only one > data segment). It also defined a small set of “system” commands, that > allowed for uniform I/O. I still have the implementation spec for that > interpreter somewhere. > > This compiler was used for the first versions of Multiplan and Word, and > my understanding is that the byte code engine was later re-used in Visual > Basic. I think the compiler also had a Xenix port, maybe it even was Xenix > native (and at this time, Xenix would still essentially have been V7). > > I am not sure to what extent this compiler was independent of the Bell > compilers. It could well be that it was based on PCC, Microsoft was a Unix > licensee after all and at the time busy doing ports. On the other hand, > Charles Simonyi would certainly have been capable of creating his own from > scratch. I do know that this compiler preceded Lattice C, the latter of > which was distributed by Microsoft as Microsoft C 1.0. > > Maybe others know more about this Simonyi/Brodie compiler? > > Paul > > Notes: > http://www.memecentral.com/mylife.htm > > https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/appdev/story/0%2C10801%2C76413%2C00.html > http://seefigure1.com/images/xenix/xenix-timeline.jpg -- *My new email address is mrochkind@gmail.com *