From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 22482 invoked from network); 19 Jun 2021 18:24:51 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 19 Jun 2021 18:24:50 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 1ECA4948C4; Sun, 20 Jun 2021 04:24:47 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8241393DBB; Sun, 20 Jun 2021 04:24:15 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id 6102B93DBB; Sun, 20 Jun 2021 04:24:12 +1000 (AEST) X-Greylist: delayed 1571 seconds by postgrey-1.36 at minnie.tuhs.org; Sun, 20 Jun 2021 04:24:11 AEST Received: from mercury.lcs.mit.edu (mercury.lcs.mit.edu [18.26.0.122]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id B3B8093D62 for ; Sun, 20 Jun 2021 04:24:11 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11178) id 845EB18C08B; Sat, 19 Jun 2021 13:57:59 -0400 (EDT) To: tuhs@tuhs.org Message-Id: <20210619175759.845EB18C08B@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2021 13:57:59 -0400 (EDT) From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Subject: Re: [TUHS] Disassemblers X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Cc: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" > From: Henry Bent > From what I can gather the only way to reasonably examine the > disassembly of a program in the early days of Unix was adb. Is this > true? Was there a way to easily produce a full disassembly? 'adb' is quite late. We had it on the PWB1 (V6 enhanced, basically) system at MIT, so its roots lie before V7. (Every time I run across people who think V7 is early, I go into 'get off my lawn' mode.) The first thing I know of that could disassemble PDP-11 code on Unix was 'db', which dates back to V1: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V1/man/man1/db.1 It wasn't optimal for doing disassembly, because it was non-trivial to dump an entire object file as assembler source - but it could be done. Later (V5 era) there was something called 'cdb', which was 'db' with extensions to make it useful for debugging code whose source was in C: https://minnie.tuhs.org//cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V4/man/man1/cdb.1 There were other non-Unix disassembler (such as DDT), also. Noel