On 2/19/2014 2:21 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
On Wed, 2014-02-19 at 00:49 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
[…]
The unix toolchain did not port well to 16 bit machines. The C compilers for the
PC were pretty much all built from scratch.
On the other hand, the UNIX tool chain worked fine for me on PDP-11s,
which were very definitely 16-bit. Though we were very happy when we got
a VAX-11/750 and 32-bits.
PC compilers needed to support multiple pointer types. The 11 did not have
segmented addresses, so this was irrelevant for the 11. Trying to retrofit unix
compilers with near/far/huge turned out to not be so practical, at least I don't
know anyone who tried it.
