Speed now & then (Space and time?)

[Paul Koning]

> On Apr 11, 2018, at 5:48 PM, ben via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> ...
>>> and real text screen UNIX is not aviable anymore.
>> Sure it is.
> 
> I have a nice 18 bit cpu here, with only a few hardware bugs.
> Hmm would it work better if I change that around ideas.
> 
> Care to point to a nice 18 bit version of unix or C.
> BTW The cpu has a frame pointer S but no S++ --S operations
> so pushing and popping wild data is not a option.

I haven't tried pcc, but supposedly that has been ported to the PDP-10, so presumably it can be ported to an 18-bit machine too.

You could try gcc; creating a simple back end is not all that hard.  And while it makes no attempt to support non-multiple-of-8-bit machines, it can be forced to, after a fashion.  One time for grins I banged together a very primitive CDC 6000 back end.  It wasn't correct but it wasn't horribly wrong...

18 bit Unix, not sure about that one.  It was originally done on a PDP-7 but I think that was before C and it's no longer around that I know of.  Still, older versions might be somewhat portable.

Does it have to be Unix?  For a simple character environment, Forth is nice and it's very easy to port to pretty much any computer.

	paul