From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2017 21:30:11 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Why did PDPs become so popular? In-Reply-To: <091301d3810a$9df2d6b0$d9d88410$@ronnatalie.com> References: <20171229163832.GA17231@mcvoy.com> <091301d3810a$9df2d6b0$d9d88410$@ronnatalie.com> Message-ID: On 12/29/17, Ron Natalie wrote: > The Alpha was hot > stuff for about nine months. Ran OSF/1 formerly DigitalUnix formerly > OSF/1. Digital UNIX for the VAX was indeed derived from OSF/1. The port to Alpha was called Tru64 UNIX. Tru64 UNIX was initially a pure 64-bit system, with no provision for building or running 32-bit program images. This turned out to be a mistake . DEC found out that a lot of ISVs had code that implicitly "knew" that sizeof() a pointer was the same as sizeof(int) was the same as 4 bytes. Tru64 was forced to implement a 32-bit compatibility mode. There was also a problem with the C compiler initially developed at DECwest in Seattle. It supported ONLY ANSI standard C and issued fatal errors for violations/extensions of the standard. We (DEC mainstream compiler group) called it the Rush Limbaugh compiler--extremely conservative, and you can't argue with it. -Paul W.