RT-11 Basic source available

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Mon Jan 30 11:26:33 CST 2017


    > From: Warner Losh

    >> I have retrieved an old/early copy of RT-11 Basic (V01-05 18-JUL-73,
    >> DEC-11-LBACA-A-LA1) modified to run under V6 Unix
    >> ..
    >> I also have a DEC MACRO-11 which runs under V6 Unix, which generates
    >> .rel files; there is a 'bind' (written in BCPL) which is a linker
    >> which reads .rel files. (There is a BCPL compiler, written in BCPL, to
    >> compile it.) Then there are two command 'relld' and 'ldrel' to convert
    >> back and forth from .rel to a.out.

    > I'd be interested...

Interested in just the BASIC, or in the whole package?


For those who are interested in running any of this stuff on a UNIX of some
sort (as opposed to, say, taking the BASIC source and editing it to run under
some DEC OS, using the pre-existing MACRO-11 on such a system), there are
dependency issues one is going to have to deal with.

That's because the MACRO-11 is written in MACRO-11, and the BCPL compiler
(which one needs to compiler the linker) is in BCPL. So before either one
can be assembled/compiled... one needs a working assembler/compiler (as the
case may be), along with a linker. Can you say 'dependency loop'...? :-)

I _do_ have working binaries (I think) for the MACRO-11, BCPL compiler, and
linker.. but they may or may not run under vanilla V6 (they ran on the
much-modified MIT-V6+, which is kind of an early PWB with a lot of MIT
additions).

Let me try them and see if they run under vanilla V6 (which I have running
under Ersatz-11), and if so, then I can hand out the whole package. That all
will take a couple of days to deal with.

	Noel


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