Embed Notice

Richard Miller's "The First #Unix Port" [1] paper (not to be confused with similarly named article of his colleague, Mr. Reinsfeld) tells a story that's pretty damn wild.

Task: Port Unix from PDP-11 to their new Interdata 7/32 computer
Travel budget: three round-trips to New South Wales uni, the closest UNIX installation on a PDP-11

Robert has no C compiler. Learns C by reading the PDP-11 compiler source printout, ports it to Interdata completely off line. Two visits to to New South Wales, runs the port through UNIX C compiler, feeds it itself, debugs a little, returns with Interdata assembly of a working compiler.

[1] https://archive.org/details/the-first-unix-port

[1/2]