Extremely CISC instructions- C compilers.

Van Snyder van.snyder at sbcglobal.net
Wed Aug 25 14:23:15 CDT 2021


On Wed, 2021-08-25 at 14:58 -0400, Todd Goodman via cctalk wrote:
> P.110 of https://walden-family.com/bbn/bbn-print2.pdf has some slight
> information.
> 
> It was advertised by Bolt, Beranek and Newman as the first computer
> to 
> be designed around the C language.

This says the computer was introduced "a year later" (i.e., a year
after March 1980).

AT&T had 3B20 computers in service in the 1970's.

Were they "designed around the C language" or was the C language shoe-
horned into them?

The C language appears to have been designed as a high-level assembler
for machines like the PDP-11, which first appeared ca 1970. At least
that's what the Wikipedioa article about the B language appears to say.



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