mortdeus / legacy-cc

The earliest versions of the very first c compiler known to exist in the wild written by the late legend himself dmr.

legacy-cc

The earliest versions of the very first c compiler known to exist in the wild written by the late legend himself dmr.

These are not capable of being compiled today with modern c compilers like gcc. I am only posting these here for the enjoyment and reminiscing of the spark that ignited a soon to be trillion dollar industry. Enjoy. :)

You guys might be able to play around building this compilier with Aiju's pdp-11/unix emulator. I havent tried building this myself so I cant confirm it works, but I posted the link to her emulator for anybody wanting to hack around with it.

Source: [https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/primevalC.html] alt-link [http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/primevalC.html]

Useful Links

PDP-11 Emulator: [http://pdp11.aiju.de/] (so i've been playing around with this to see if it still works, and it clearly has problems right now. if somebody wants to try and create like a VM image of unix running on PDP-7 hardware, id happily link to it here.)

Research Unix Repository: [https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/]

legacy-cc's Issues

README.md has incorrect source link

The source link to the dmr page is outdated. The correct link is:

http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/primevalC.html

How to compile legacy compiler?

I'd assume there's some other legacy compiler capable of compiling this, or maybe gcc or clang with tons of compiler options.

issue regarding source code license.

In 2002 Caldera (now SCO group) re-licensed 16-bit UNIX code to a 4-clause BSD license, which is good for historical interests. However, that license requires that it be distributed with the code.

The following file should be included as COPYING.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20090219220353/http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf

This is of course the result of idle discussion on Reddit.