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"In 1972, on a PDP-11, they wrote the first C compiler, and simultaneously re-wrote UNIX in C. Initially, portability wasn’t the actual goal, but C did resonate
by Annatar 8y ago
"In 1972, on a PDP-11, they wrote the first C compiler, and simultaneously re-wrote UNIX in C. Initially, portability wasn’t the actual goal, but C did resonate with a lot of people, and C compilers were ported to other systems."
The fathers of UNIX explicitly said in one of the interviews that they invented C so that they could make UNIX portable.
- steveklabnik 8y agoSo, I had heard that as well, but http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.138.35&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.138..., co-authored by Dennis Ritchie, says > C was developed for the PDP-11 on the UNIX system in 1972. Portability was not an explicit goal in its design, even though limitations in the underlying machine model assumed by the predecessors of C made us well aware that not all machines were the same [2]. So that's what I went with.