Two Stop Bits | Some forget that Unix started out on the pdp-7 which was 18-bit words so in some...

bmonkey325 1 day ago | parent

Some forget that Unix started out on the pdp-7 which was 18-bit words so in some ways the architecture argument doesn’t really hold up. I think it’s more what machine were they could access.

https://linfo.org/pdp-7.html#:~:text=The%20PDP-7%20was%20a%2....

larsbrinkhoff 20 hours ago
PDP-7 Unix is even more cramped with a 12-bit address space per process.
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- bmonkey325 16 hours ago
  This version of Unix was all assembly code and not portable. Once they could move to a better machine I think they realized they didn’t want to write it again in assembly because porting could be difficult.
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  - larsbrinkhoff 14 hours ago
    My argument is that the PDP-7 and PDP-11 possibly forced the Unix philosophy. I don't understand what you are arguing.
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KODust 1 day ago
Yes, this is the thing -- it's clear that Ken Thompson valued simplicity, one reason being that he and a couple of other people could maintain the entire thing without a large support organization. Whether that would have survived the PDP-10, I'm not sure. But I suspect it would have have been recognizably Unix.
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