Developing Mars lander software

[Walter Bright]

On 2/19/2014 2:21 AM, Russel Winder wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-02-19 at 00:49 -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
> […]
>> The unix toolchain did not port well to 16 bit machines. The C compilers for the
>> PC were pretty much all built from scratch.
>
> On the other hand, the UNIX tool chain worked fine for me on PDP-11s,
> which were very definitely 16-bit. Though we were very happy when we got
> a VAX-11/750 and 32-bits.
>

PC compilers needed to support multiple pointer types. The 11 did not have 
segmented addresses, so this was irrelevant for the 11. Trying to retrofit unix 
compilers with near/far/huge turned out to not be so practical, at least I don't 
know anyone who tried it.