Small C ver 1.00 source?

wrcooke at wrcooke.net wrcooke at wrcooke.net
Mon Jul 13 14:06:54 CDT 2020


> On July 13, 2020 at 1:30 PM Phil Budne <phil at ultimate.com> wrote:
> 
> I can't make ANY assertions about version or pedigree of the files(which came to me in 1981 when I was using a PDP-10), but they APPEARto be from Ron Cain himself, from SRI-KL (TOPS-20):
> ftp://ftp.ultimate.com/pdp10/c80.tar.gz
> Which contains runtime files from November 1979, and compiler filesdated June 1981.


Hi Phil,
Thanks!  That sure looks like the right one.  It is 8080 code, the comments and docs mostly match what is published from a quick look.  I will look into it more when I am home and have some time.  But I do believe that is the "original" as published in DDJ.

Notes and justification
I started looking for this mainly because I wanted to play with it.  I want to actually use it to write some code and see how hard it is to write usable code with the limited subset of the earliest released version.  But when I started looking I was shocked that I couldn't find the original.  There are dozens, at least, of derivatives in various versions.  Z80, 8088, 6502!, TI 9900 I think and more.  Floating point, structs, optimizers, etc.  I personally think this was a VERY important piece of software.  I think the number of derivatives speaks volumes of how important it was.  But I couldn't find the original.  I feel it should be preserved.  Even the DDJ Small C CD ROM didn't have it!  (They only used 34Megs of the Disk so they had plenty of room.)  
Anyway, it looks like Phil found it.  I appreciate all the efforts getting it.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to where it should go for safekeeping?  I plan on putting it on my web site, but that is far from an archival solution.

Thanks,
Will


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