From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: crossd@gmail.com (Dan Cross) Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2016 11:32:08 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs In-Reply-To: References: <0f57f9d8248db61cba34372814d2f45e.squirrel@webmail.yaccman.com> Message-ID: On Jun 30, 2016 10:10 AM, "Marc Rochkind" wrote: > Bill Cheswick: "What a different world it would be if IBM had selected > the M68000 and UCSD Pascal. Both seemed > to me to better better choices at the time." > > Not for those of us trying to write serious software. The IBM PC came out > in August, 1981, and I left Bell Labs to write software for it full time > about 5 months later. At the time, it seemed to me to represent the future, > and that turned out to be a correct guess. > > Microsoft Basic is well known as the primary initial language for the PC, > but from day one there was another choice called Microsoft Pascal (we used > the IBM Pascal version). It was a considerable extension over classical > Pascal. It had full-blown string manipulation and pointers. With it, I was > able to implement a text editor called EDIX and an nroff-ripoff called > WORDIX. The compiler was full of bugs, but it was a true compiler, and the > programs were small enough and fast enough to work well on the limited 8088 > (I think that was the processor) hardware. > I don't know about UCSD Pascal versus MS-DOS, but I think you yourself just alluded to the processor distinction that Ches was referring to. Of course it's only of historical interest now, but from a technology standpoint MC68000 vs Intel 8088 seems like a no-brainer: the 68k is the superior chip. From a business perspective, I guess it was a very different matter, but that's not my area and the ship has long sailed over the horizon. Still, it's fun to speculate and I can't help but think that a 68k-based IBM PC would have been a nicer machine. Initially, with no hard drive, I had to switch floppies several times just > to compile one file. Later, I got a 6MB hard drive for about $3000. > Interestingly, that drive could not even hold one (raw) image from my > current digital camera! > > We could not have used Microsoft Basic or UCSD Pascal. > > Just a few years later, something called Lattice C came along, and we > switched (back) to C, and stayed with it from there on out. > Something I never understood about the IBM PC: even the 8088 machine was fairly beefy compared to e.g. a PDP-11/20. The 6th Edition Unix kernel was objectively pretty small and understandable; mini-Unix showed that that sort of software could be used on a machine without an MMU. I've never understood why IBM didn't just write a real OS in a high-level language instead of saddling the world with MS-DOS. Perhaps it's naive of me, but even if they didn't use Unix directly, it was an existence proof that such a thing was possible. I suppose, again, it was less a technical issue and more a business issue, or perhaps I'm underestimating the amount of work or missing some of the technical complexities. - Dan C. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: