4 ms·

The First Unix Port (1998) [pdf]

68 points by jsnell 9y ago

jdblair 9y ago
I remember hearing this paper presented at USENIX 1998, in New Orleans. IIRC, the most interesting part of the presentation was a slide titled "Is UNIX portable?" Miller said, of course it is, I ported it! But then he showed a chart with the number of lines of code in the distribution and the number he had to replace for the Interdata mini, and the proportion was quite large! His punch line was that yes, he had ported UNIX, but it wasn't quite so clear that you could call it portable.
Taniwha 9y ago
I did something similar, porting first V6 then V7 to the Vax some time starting in '79 ... The process started with writing a tar clone in fortran to get the C source off of the tape, luckily I had a C compiler for VMS ... The result was a Unix that ran VAX native in a VM, each copy ran in a single VMS process ... Then I did V7, much easier the second time around
- Taniwha 9y ago
  Oh, and that famous comment "you're not expected to understand this" .... Completely obvious about 2 months in when you come at it from the right direction (swapping a process in)
luckydude 9y ago
People interested in this will really like this: http://www.tuhs.org/ http://www.tuhs.org/
- simula67 9y ago
  Or this : https://landley.net/history/mirror/ https://landley.net/history/mirror/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pmarin 9y ago
Richard Miller is the same gentleman who many years later ported Plan 9 to the Raspberry Pi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw
enf 9y ago
Another paper disputes Miller's claim to priority: https://archive.org/details/first-unix-port https://archive.org/details/first-unix-port
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  As far as I can tell, the paper you link definitely confirms the essence of what Miller Says. The end of the link says "We here at Bell Laboratories were truly dumfounded when this visitor from an unknown school in Australia reported his elegant procedure and remarkable success. Our own people took considerably longer to move UNIX to an Interdata machine, not because they were not as clever but because they had a different objective: a portable Unix rather than a UNIX port. But I think they'd . have blinked before undertaking the heroic effort that Richard Miller did and he did not even have a Unix computer to port from. " I cannot see that as any sort of dispute.
  - enf 9y ago
    OK, good point. I probably misread it.

68 points by jsnell 9y ago

I remember hearing this paper presented at USENIX 1998, in New Orleans. IIRC, the most interesting part of the presentation was a slide titled "Is UNIX portable?" Miller said, of course it is, I ported it! But then he showed a chart with the number of lines of code in the distribution and the number he had to replace for the Interdata mini, and the proportion was quite large! His punch line was that yes, he had ported UNIX, but it wasn't quite so clear that you could call it portable.

Taniwha 9y ago

I did something similar, porting first V6 then V7 to the Vax some time starting in '79 ... The process started with writing a tar clone in fortran to get the C source off of the tape, luckily I had a C compiler for VMS ... The result was a Unix that ran VAX native in a VM, each copy ran in a single VMS process ... Then I did V7, much easier the second time around

Taniwha 9y ago
Oh, and that famous comment "you're not expected to understand this" .... Completely obvious about 2 months in when you come at it from the right direction (swapping a process in)

luckydude 9y ago

People interested in this will really like this: http://www.tuhs.org/ http://www.tuhs.org/

simula67 9y ago
Or this : https://landley.net/history/mirror/ https://landley.net/history/mirror/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pmarin 9y ago

Richard Miller is the same gentleman who many years later ported Plan 9 to the Raspberry Pi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw

enf 9y ago

Another paper disputes Miller's claim to priority: https://archive.org/details/first-unix-port https://archive.org/details/first-unix-port

joe_the_user 9y ago
As far as I can tell, the paper you link definitely confirms the essence of what Miller Says. The end of the link says "We here at Bell Laboratories were truly dumfounded when this visitor from an unknown school in Australia reported his elegant procedure and remarkable success. Our own people took considerably longer to move UNIX to an Interdata machine, not because they were not as clever but because they had a different objective: a portable Unix rather than a UNIX port. But I think they'd . have blinked before undertaking the heroic effort that Richard Miller did and he did not even have a Unix computer to port from. " I cannot see that as any sort of dispute.
- enf 9y ago
  OK, good point. I probably misread it.