Cobol - Re: C and COBOL (was: If you were inventing CoBOL...)

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Re: C and COBOL (was: If you were inventing CoBOL...)

Richard

2004-09-28, 3:55 am

Robert Wagner <robert@wagner.net.yourmammaharvests> wrote

> It was available globally to everyone working for Bell Labs and
> running a PDP-7. The first commercial C compiler was Whitesmiths in
> 1978.

According to Ritchie and Kernighan writing in the 'Bell System
Technical Journal':

"""C was originally written for the PDP-11 under Unix, but the
language is not tied to any particular hardware or operating system. C
compilers run on a wide variety of machines, including the Honeywell
6000, the IBM System/370, and the Interdata 8/32."""

Note that Unix at the time was written in assembler and was recoded to
C for edition 6.

Also note that the very first machine to run what became Unix was a
PDP-9, not a -7. Not that there is much difference.

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