[TUHS] 2.11BSD cross compiler

[lm@bitmover.com (Larry McVoy)]

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On all this old school stuff - just in case you think it doesn't matter,
it does.  One of the best guys I have here is a guy who did printer 
firmware.  I had to teach him what a cache was, he had never seen one.
But holy moly does he hold the whole picture in his head.  And has 
forgotten more about SCM than I'll ever know (we do that stuff, 
BitKeeper, etc).

People who understand the hardware are useful.  I cringe at what we 
call a CS degree these days.

And BTW, if you are one of those old school guys and want a job, hit 
me up.  We're very picky, we have a ~8 year retention rate, but that's
because we make sure that you will be happy and we will be happy.  If
we have one good hire a year I'm ecstatic.  Gotta be Bay Area for the
first year though (you can live in my guest house in the redwoods :)

--lm

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:59:22PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at bitmover.com> wrote:
> 
> > Color me old school.  I like MIPS, I worked at SGI (got married to
> > an old school MIPS gal) but PDP-11 is so frigging intuitive.  How
> > can you not understand that instruction set?  If you can't, well,
> > sorry, not so much in my book.  It's like a stripped down C.
> 
> Yeah.  I used it on and off, but my serious assembler programming was
> on the PDP-8.  Now *that* was seriously small, but you had to know the
> tricks, like how to find out the absolute address of the 128-word
> memory page following the one you are on when writing PIC code for
> OS/8 device drivers, or how to microprogram the operate instructions
> get interesting constants into the AC.
> 
> > Come on - has anyone ever seen a better instruction set?  More
> > complicated, yeah, holy moly, yeah.  But cleaner?  We owe DEC
> > for that one.
> 
> I remember how appalled I was when I saw the VAX instruction set.
> Luckily, it didn't matter: I never did assembler again.  Still, trying
> to make people think in octal at this late date seems unnecessary.
> 
> > Personally, I like anyone who can do any assembler.  One of my interview
> > questions is "have you written swtch?"
> 
> /me chuckles.
> 
> >  If you don't get the question you are not an OS person,
> > if you are, of course you get it.
> 
> Well, I know what it is but I've never written it.  There was a bug in
> the V6 kernel version anyhow.
> 
> > Ken Witte - wonder where he is now.
> 
> Too many others out there, alas.

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Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com