18 bit CPU; was: Speed now & then

[Diane Bruce]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 07:16:58AM -0500, Mark Linimon via cctalk wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 11:45:07PM -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> > Looks pretty much like standard C until you get into the minutiae, such
> > as "A character constant is 1 to 4 characters" and page 4-4 "Data Types"
> > (9 bit characters and 36 bit ints and 18 bit short ints).
...
> "pretty straightforward"
> 
> Thanks.  I needed a laugh.
> 
> As someone who tries to get/keep a zillion open source packages building
> on FreeBSD, on non-x86 archs, I constantly refer to a piece of paper that
> hangs on my wall.  It was given to me many years ago at a conference, by
> its author, Henry Spencer.  An annotated version may be found here:
> 
>   https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html

One of my favourites. Henry is an interesting guy but it has been years
since I've talked with him in person. He's also responsible for 
"The Amazingly Workable Formatter". 

> 
> Of course these days s/VAX/32-bit Linux distro/, but the principle still
> holds.
> 
> Finally, for any remaining disbelievers, the most recent update of
> FreeBSD's toolchain to include Clang version 6, regressed 419 port
> builds -- on x86 alone.

*chuckle* A pointer isn't just an int anymore now. ;) 

Amusingly years ago I worked for Computing Devices Canada that used some
CDC computers. I was told through a very reliable source that they 
got Unix ported to the Cyber by SoftQuad based in Toronto. They were
well known as a 'troff house' at this time. I'm told they wrote a PDP-11
emulator for the Cyber and that's how they got Unix on the Cyber. ;)

> mcl

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