ioccc/2018/mills

Best of show

Christopher Mills mrxo@sonic.net
Twitter: @MisterXopher

To build:

make

To run:

./prog

Try:

./prog

At the >boot prompt, type return

At the : prompt, type rk(0,0)rkunix

NOTE: To quit, press Control-E.

Selected Judges' Remarks:

Do small machines only need small programs? This program weighs in at just 3636 bytes, which is considerably lighter than the original machine it can replace.

This program can take you back to the start of everything, it is possible to run v0. Just type:

./v0

NOTE: To quit v0, press Control-E.

You will be greeted with a familiar prompt of "login". The username and password are "dmr" and "dmr". To make things more familiar you'll need to create '.' as it hasn't been invented yet on this image!

@ ln dd dmr .

An ls will reveal that C hasn't been invented yet! IOBCC anyone? The compiler is bc. It produces assembly, which will then need to be assembled together like ops.s bl.s hello.s bi.s (in that order) to produce a.out!

But wait, we said this was the start of it all! This program can also run a program that replaces an even larger machine that can run BSD 2.9. To start this,

./prog

At the ">boot" prompt, type return

At the ":" prompt, type "rk(0,0)rkunix"

NOTE: To quit prog, press Control-E.

This should now be very familiar and it is possible to compile and run one of the very first IOCCC entires "mullender.c".

But wait, there is even more! Try:

./v6

At the "@" prompt, type rkunix. You might want to type stty -lcase as otherwise the output will be in all caps.

NOTE: To quit v6, press Control-E.

Author's comments:

This IOCCC entry is dedicated to the late Dennis M. Ritchie

The Program:

Since this is the 25th "annual" IOCCC, I thought I should mark the occasion with a look back to its earliest roots. At the same time the contest enters its 34th year of providing a safe forum for poor C code, the C language itself is fast approaching its 50th anniversary, along with the UNIX operating system whose history is so entwined with.

The program delivered here is both a full machine emulation of the original PDP-7 that Ken Thompson used to write the first version of UNIX and a full machine emulation of the PDP-11/40 used by subsequent UNIXes. The Makefile can build versions that can run each of the following:

1. UNIX v0 for the PDP-7 (circa 1969)
2. Research UNIX Version 6 (circa 1975)
3. BSD 2.9 (circa 1983)

For reasons to be described in a bit, the last (BSD 2.9) is the default.

Building and Running BSD 2.9:

To run BSD 2.9, do make to build prog and then ./prog to run it.

You should see a prompt from the first-stage bootloader that looks like

    >boot

Hit enter/return at this point and you will get to the second-stage boot loader that looks like

    40Boot
    :

The 40 in the prompt indicates that the bootloader has correctly determined that we are running on a PDP-11/40.

At this point, type the rather cryptic command rk(0,0)rkunix -- this tells the system to look at the first partition on the first RK05 fixed disk, find the rkunix file and load it. You should eventually see the following:

    >boot
    
    40Boot
    : rk(0,0)rkunix
    
    Berkeley UNIX (Rev. 2.9.1) Sun Nov 20 14:55:50 PST 1983
    mem = 135872

    CONFIGURE SYSTEM:
    xp ? csr 176700 vector 254 skipped:  No CSR
    rk 0 csr 177400 vector 220 attached
    hk ? csr 177440 vector 210 skipped:  No CSR
    rl ? csr 174400 vector 160 skipped:  No CSR
    rp ? csr 176700 vector 254 skipped:  No CSR
    ht 0 csr 172440 vector 224 skipped:  No CSR
    tm 0 csr 172520 vector 224 skipped:  No CSR
    ts 0 csr 172520 vector 224 skipped:  No CSR
    dh ? csr 160020 vector 370 skipped:  No CSR
    dm ? csr 170500 vector 360 skipped:  No autoconfig routines
    dz ? csr 160110 vector 320 skipped:  No CSR
    dz ? csr 160110 vector 320 skipped:  No CSR
    dn 0 csr 175200 vector 300 skipped:  No autoconfig routines
    vp ? csr 177500 vector 174 skipped:  No autoconfig routines
    lp ? csr 177514 vector 200 skipped:  No CSR
    Erase=^?, kill=^U, intr=^C
    # 

Congratulations, you are running BSD UNIX 2.9 in single-user mode as root.

On the other hand, if you did a typo somewhere, the boot loader has probably crashed and halted -- if so, type Control-E to quit the simulation and try again. If you did really badly, you might have corrupted the virtual disk. If so, consider a make clean to start from scratch.

Assuming you managed to type 15 characters correctly, You should be at the root prompt. Most of the commands you are familiar with work here (this was only a quarter of a century ago -- how much could things have changed?). Let's try some:

    # ls
    .cshrc       .profile     boot         hkunix       mnt          tmp
    .login       2.9stamp     dev          lib          mullender.c  unix
    .msgsrc      bin          etc          lost+found   rkunix       usr
    # df
    Filesystem  Mounted on  kbytes    used    free  % used
    /dev/rk0    /             1958    1688     270     86%
    # bin/cc mullender.c
    # ./a.out

The program you've just run was the [winner of the first IOCCC contest from 1984] 1 (or was it 1894?), a personal favorite of mine. It is rather tightly bound to running on either a PDP-11 or a VAX. Now you have one.

Hitting Control-C will return you to the BSD UNIX prompt. Hitting Control-D will log you out of the single-user session and get you back to the :login: prompt. Here you can log in as root and get a full time-sharing session. Feel free to try things like vi. I've taken the liberty of editing the .login and .profile files to set the console to a less traditional setup so that you don't have to wait for the Model 33 KSR teletype to move its carriage. I've also predefined TERM to vt100, which will probably work well enough with whatever sort of ANSI terminal emulation you are using.

Note that I have not mounted the /usr disk here, so some commands from /usr/bin will be missing, along with all of the man pages. They are [available online] 2 if you need them. Adding a second RK05 disk was possible, but I didn't get around to it... As the Judges can no doubt attest, "Mid 2017" creeps up on you quicker than you expect. :)

Once you've had enough fun in BSD 2.9, type Control-E to exit the emulation.

Building and Running Research UNIX v6:

Research UNIX v6 and BSD 2.9 use the same executable, but require a different disk image. Type make v6 to build it, then type ./prog to run it.

You should see the boot loader prompt which is a single @:

    @

At this point, you again must type a special incantation: rkunix. After that you should see:

    @rkunix
    mem = 1035
    RESTRICTED RIGHTS
    
    Use, duplication or disclosure is subject to
    restrictions stated in Contract with Western
    Electric Company, Inc.
    # 

You are now running a single-user session of v6 UNIX. You might want to start with stty -lcase because otherwise everything will be IN ALL CAPS.

Again, if you failed typing seven characters without making a mistake, you may need to use Control-E to quit the simulation.

Assuming you're more careful than that, we can try a few commands:

    @rkunix
    mem = 1035
    RESTRICTED RIGHTS
    
    Use, duplication or disclosure is subject to
    restrictions stated in Contract with Western
    Electric Company, Inc.
    # STTY -LCASE
    # ls
    bin
    dev
    etc
    hpunix
    lib
    mnt
    rkunix
    rpunix
    tmp
    unix
    usr
    # cat > foo.c
    main()
    {
        printf("Hello, World!\n");
    }
^D
    # cc foo.c
    # ./a.out
    Hello, World!

Why is Version 6 interesting? Well, it was the oldest version that I could find a boot image of that had a C compiler... This C compiler is recognizably C, but not quite the same syntax as we have today. It's much closer to the [B language] 3 from which it is derived. In particular, this C compiler would not be able to compile mullender.c (as simple as it is), because the following syntax features don't exist yet:

• The short data type doesn't exist yet. Only int (short will show up when long comes, and the port to the Interdata 7/32 starts to make the idea of portability become important).
• Hexadecimal constants don't exist yet. Digital's computers all used octal.
• The array initializer syntax hasn't yet moved to using =. It still uses the older form taken from B, which looks like array[] { 1, 2, 3 };

It can still compile "Hello World!" (note that you must type a Control-D after you finish entering the code, to let cat see an end-of-file).

This version of UNIX doesn't go into multi-user mode if you do a Control-D. Single-user mode was entered because the front-panel console switches were set to the magic number 0173030 (this can be changed with a recompile).

Once you are done with Version 6, Type Control-E to exit the simulation.

Note that since both BSD 2.9 and UNIX v6 use the same PDP-11/40 emulation code, and they use the same name for the disk (rk05.fs), if you want to go back to the BSD simulation, you should either delete rk05.fs or do a make clean before you do a make.

Building and Running UNIX v0:

We now set the Wayback Machine to the very start of it all, 1969.

[The story] 4 here is interesting and well worth a read. Bell Labs was pulling out of the Multics project and Ken Thompson and his colleagues had become accustomed to the relatively nice programming environment. They also enjoyed the early computer game [Space Travel] 5 and wanted another system to run it on. They found a PDP-7 which was already obsolete at the time to port Space Travel to. The primitive programming environment influenced Thompson to recreate parts of the Multics experience in the much more hardware-constrained PDP-7 environment. In the summer of 1969, with his wife out on a month-long vacation, Thompson rewrote a filesystem emulation he had been experimenting with to include an assembler, a shell, an editor and an operating system kernel and hence created the first version of UNIX (although it hadn't been named that yet).

You can try out this version by typing make v0. Since this version is a native PDP-7 emulation, it gets its own binary. Type ./v0 to run it. You should see the login prompt.

    login:

There are two user accounts ken and dmr, with the passwords ken and dmr respectively. Let's try the Dennis Richie's dmr account:

    login: dmr
    password: dmr
    @ ls
    .       ?

Even though this is not Ken's doing, I feel this gives me licence to include this quote from the BSD fortune program:

Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes any mistake, a giant "?" lights up in the center of the dashboard. "The experienced driver", he says, "will usually know what's wrong."

What's the deal here? Well, that's a slightly long story. The short version is we have gone so far back in the history of UNIX that we don't have filesystem paths yet. In other words, we can't say something like /bin/ls yet, and the shell can't store that path in $PATH to search for it. We also haven't invented . or .. yet. In fact, the filesystem isn't even the traditional UNIX tree structure, it's a directed graph of hard links...

ls needs to be able to read ., the current directory. dmr's home directory doesn't have that yet, but we can make it, because the home directory has a hard link to dd, which is the directory that holds all of the user home directories (this will eventually become /, the root path). We can do

    @ ln dd dmr .

To make the new link (note that ln doesn't support paths either, so you have to give it three arguments -- a directory in the current dir, a file in that directory, and the new name).

Now ls will work, and we can try some other things while we are here:

    login: dmr
    password: dmr
    @ ln dd dmr .
    @ ls
    dd      
    system  
    as.s    
    b_readme
    bi.s    
    bl.s    
    db.s    
    hello.b 
    ops.s   
    .       
    @ cat b_readme
    Here is how to compile and run hello.b:
    
      @ bc hello.b hello.s
      @ as ops.s bl.s hello.s bi.s
      I
      II
      ops.s   
      bl.s    
      hello.s 
      bi.s    
      @ a.out
      Hello, World!
    
    
    @ bc hello.b hello.s
    @ as ops.s bl.s hello.s bi.s
    I
    II
    ops.s   
    bl.s    
    hello.s 
    bi.s    
    @ a.out
    Hello, World!
    @ 

The last command is invoking the compiler for an extremely early version of the [B programming language] 3, the predecessor to C. Thompson missed the convenience of writing code in a high-level language -- Multics was written a version of PL/1 -- and wanted the same convenience on UNIX. He preferred BCPL (a typeless language) to PL/1. As Dennis Ritchie [wrote] 6:

B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain.

A look at the B reference manual will show the strong correlation with C, and shows the source of a lot of C's mysteriousness -- some of which is preserved simply so that C could compile the dozens of lines of existing B code...

Thompson's assembler was also extremely simple. It didn't even know about opcodes -- these need to be defined in the first assembly file, with the assembler OR-ing the opcode fields together (space was the "operator" for logical OR). There is no link step -- all files are provided to the assembler on the command line, concatenated together and assembled, producing a single a.out (assembler output) file. Even after UNIX got a linker, a.out remained the default name of the binary generated by the linker (and hence also by cc).

This system is still has the familiarity of UNIX, with all the two and three letter commands, device files, shell redirection and the same core system calls (read, write, open, close, creat, fork, etc.). There are a number of differences still:

• As noted, there are no file paths.
• read and write do I/O on (18-bit) words. Character I/O on files need to unpack those bytes, and of course deal with NUL characters.
• exec was performed by the shell directly. Arguments are passed as four words (eight bytes), and space padded. This matches the format for file names for open and creat.
• wait does not yet exist. A more complicated mechanism for sending and receiving messages (smes and rmes) are used instead.
• File permission bits are all different, since groups don't exist yet.
• User programs are not allowed to run during disk I/O. This is because the disk controller's "data break" (DMA) accesses were so fast relative to the CPU that transfers would be dropped if an instruction that used "deferred" mode (indirection) was executed. This also meant that the "program break" (interrupt) routine in the kernel had to specifically avoid deferred accesses by using self-modifying code to do indirection through pointers.
• Although the PDP-7 supported a "trap mode" (a primitive supervisor mode), the UNIX kernel doesn't use it. This means that user programs could alter or crash the kernel at will (in fact, there is a system call that returns addresses of useful kernel routines so that user code can call them directly).

As usual, when you are done exploring UNIX v0, type Control-E to exit the simulator.

About the Program:

The program came about when I was looking for something to honor the pending 50th anniversary of the C language (because of the mercurial nature of IOCCC contest scheduling, I chose not to wait for the actual 50th anniversary). I had thought of writing self-hosting compilers for a stripped-down version of C, or maybe even a version of the B language... At the same time, I was obsessed with the idea of allowing mullender.c from 1984 to run. Although that was still a possibility on an interpreted version of B or a stripped-down version of C, it felt cheap, as it would be mullender.c only in spirit.

It was during this time that I discovered that in 2016, members of the Unix Heritage Society got access to [printouts of assembly-language source for the original version of UNIX] 7. With what was a [huge amount of work] 8, they scanned in the printouts, fixed up the OCR translations, built assembler and file system tools from scratch and made an accurate simulation of Thompson's PDP-7 that allowed them to get the system up and running. Although source for the entire kernel and about half of the user-space commands were present (including the runtime and libraries for the B compiler), the remainder needed to be written from scratch, including the shell. The final results of the project are [available on GitHub] 9.

None of this was remotely easy (as I was to discover myself). The PDP-7 is long gone, and the documentation for it is less complete than one would like. In addition, the devices attached for it were a bit of a mystery. The disk system is referenced only in an old price list. It was a RB09 fixed disk, probably made by Burroughs. It is close to what was called the RC10 for the PDP-10, but with a different interface. And the system also included a custom display device called Graphics-2, which had been built in-house by AT&T. It can't be completely ignored, because the kernel itself pokes at it (the UNIX crew used it as a second terminal -- a "glass TTY").

I decided that implementing this PDP-7 would be possible as an IOCCC entry.

The emulator emulates the full machine:

• PDP-7 Central Processor
• Core Memory Module Type 147 -- extends the core to 8,192 18-bit words
• Extended Arithmetic Element Type 177 -- adds one's-complement multiplication, division and shifting
• Real Time Clock
• Teletype Model 33 KSR
• Perforated Tape Reader Type 444
• RB09 Fixed Disk Controller

The [PDP-7] 10 is an odd duck by modern computer standards:

• 18 bit words, with no byte addressing.
• Both one's and two's complement math (there is ADD for one's complement and TAD for two's complement). The EAE is entirely one's-complement.
• "Microcoded" instructions.
• Auto-increment memory locations.
• Non-reentrant function calls (the return address is stored at the indicated address and the PC jumps to the location after it).
• The XCT instruction, that executes the word loaded from memory as an instruction.
• An instruction LAW that loads the instruction opcode into the accumulator.
• Heavy use of "inline" operands. For instance the MUL instruction expects the second operand to be stored in memory after the instruction. This pretty much requires the use of self-modifying code.
• No immediates. Almost all constants have to live in memory locations and be referenced by address.
• Common operations, like "subtract" and "inclusive OR" are not directly supported on the machine and require multiple instructions and some spare memory locations to support. Being clever also helps.
• Single accumulator architecture. No direct support for things like stacks.
• I/O is done with dedicated I/O instructions (which are also microcoded).
• The RB09 disk controller gets a special mention here because of its particularly annoying encoding of track and sector offsets in [packed BCD] 11. A non-trivial amount of code space in the simulator is needed to convert into and out of BCD, along with an equivalent amount of code in the UNIX kernel itself.

The simulation handles everything I was able to discover about the PDP-7, even things that the UNIX code itself doesn't use. For instance, it correctly implements the "trap mode" feature (a primitive form of supervisor mode) even though the kernel does not enable it. It also implements the microcoding of the EAE instructions even though the UNIX environment uses only the standard encodings. If you wanted to do a 11-bit multiply instead of an 18-bit one, it will probably work.

The simulation starts by loading a boot program off of the virtualized paper tape, which is in a modified version of the RIM boot loader format. The RIM format encodes each 18-bit word as three six-bit characters, using one bit to denote the final word (which is executed directly and is usually a JMP or HLT instruction). The load address comes from the console address switches. Both of these are controlled by compile-time flags.

The emulator continues emulating instructions until it sees a HLT instruction which will cause it to exit. Console I/O is emulated by setting the terminal into raw mode and polling via read. Line-clock ticks (at 60 Hz) are done by polling gettimeofday. Dynamic frequency code arranges to reduce the polling interval to a few polls per tick, so that simulation remains responsive. Since we use the real wall-clock time, this means that the emulated system will see time advance at the correct rate.

Licencing Fun

So now I have a system that can run UNIX v0. One problem remains... I don't have permission to submit UNIX v0 to the IOCCC. It is not my code and the copyright for it remains the property of whoever owns that part of what was once Bell Labs -- I believe it is Nokia at this point. I have worked around this problem in two ways:

First, I didn't submit the source code or binary image for v0 UNIX as part of my IOCCC entry. I merely submitted a Makefile that can issue a curl command to fetch a prebuilt v0 disk image from the github repository. I am hoping this is considered part of "Legal abuse of the rules" which is supposed to be "somewhat encouraged". As per RULE 12, I am justifying said abuse here, in the remarks file.

Secondly, the choice to run the UNIX v0 code is optional. If you are worried about Nokia's lawyers running you to ground for running a 50-year old copy of a binary image for a machine that is almost completely non-existent, you can just not do so. Delete the lines from the Makefile and sleep well. You still have two other UNIXes to play with.

What about the other two UNIX variants? These are both covered by licences that allow me to use them. Back in 2002, Caldera International released Research Unix versions 1-7 and 32V under a [permissive BSD-like license] 12. BSD UNIX is based off of v7 UNIX, and of course has its own permissive BSD licence. And in 2017, Nokia also released versions 8-10 under the condition that it will not assert copyright rights for non-commercial use.

So the newer UNIXes are in the clear. I doubt anyone actually cares about version 0 either, but technically it's still under copyright.

PDP-11/40

So if I have a PDP-7 emulator, how do I run operating systems that expect a PDP-11? Simple... I emulate a PDP-11/40 on the PDP-7. I have written PDP-7 assembler code to emulate a PDP-11/40 with the following equipment:

• PDP-11/40 (KD11-A)
• EIS instruction set (KE11-E)
• Memory management unit (KJ11-A)
• Line time clock (KT11-D)
• 124 Kwords of memory (244 Kbytes)
• RK05 fixed disk drive (RK11)
• Console TTY (DL11)

This required a few tweaks to the emulator. The first problem is that the RK05 disk is about 2.5 MB, but the RB09 is only about 2 MB. That's easily solvable -- just add more tracks to the RB09. UNIX v0 is unlikely to notice (although the number of tracks is a compile time parameter, and the v0 build commands set it to the correct value).

The second problem is that we are simulating a system that can have up to 124K words of memory on a system with only 8K words total. That meant I needed to virtualize the PDP-11/40's physical memory (and add a few more tracks to the disk to hold the virtualization).

A large amount of time was spent tuning this code to be efficient. The memory virtualization uses part of the 8 Kword memory as an LRU cache, and uses a number of first-level microcaches to avoid having to do the LRU updates. This also serves to offload the complexity of the PDP-11's segmentation logic from a large number of memory accesses (the PDP-11 does as many as eight accesses per instruction). Despite the super fast emulated disk, the PDP-7 code in the emulator is slow, mostly because it has to do a bunch of divides to convert the linear disk offset into a BCD-coded track and sector for the emulated RB09. I/O polling is again used, except this time it uses the PDP-7's "skip on flag set" I/O instructions. As with the PDP-7 emulator itself, the PDP-11 emulator dynamically measures the instruction throughput relative to the line-clock tick, so that it only polls for I/O a few times per tick.

The one remaining problem is building the disk images themselves. Since the PDP-11's disk is 16-bit, but the PDP-7's is 18-bit (which the emulator stores in 32-bit ints), a conversion program is needed to unpack the binary disk images from 16 bits per word to 32. This in turn needs to be done in the Makefile using standard POSIX tools, which aren't exactly good with binary. I had a weirdly clever way to do this with od, awk and uudecode that I will leave as an exercise for the curious, but I decided it would be easier to do it with the PDP-7 emulator itself, feeding a simple program in on its boot tape. This required an additional tweak to the emulator, since by default its console TTY is not eight-bit clean (in fact, UNIX v0 expects to see the MSB set on the terminal reads, and sets it on writes, what is called "mark" parity). This is also enabled by a compile-time setting (used only for the builddisk program).

Despite the complexity of the PDP-11 instruction set and its emulated I/O devices and the corresponding primitiveness of the PDP-7's instruction set, the emulation itself is a surprisingly small amount of code, not really taxing the 8K word memory, with about 2.25 Kwords of actual code and a similar amount of space for the memory virtualization cache and disk block buffer, leaving nearly half (3.5 Kwords) of the memory unused. The simulator executes somewhere around 250 PDP-7 instructions per PDP-11 instruction. On my laptop, the PDP-7 is running somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 MIPS, which means the PDP-11 is running at about 0.3 MIPS, which is probably not too far off of its actual speed (the cycle time of an 11/40 was around a microsecond for simple instructions, but could be proportionally larger for instructions that did multiple memory accesses, which many did).

As an aside, although the idea of emulating the PDP-11 on an emulated PDP-7 came about from the realization that I needed a response to the late-discovered licence issue, I'm quite pleased with the result -- it enables an interesting window on the dawn of the UNIX era. I feel that someone should complete the circle here by emulating a VAX 780 on the PDP-11 and run 4.2BSD on it, so that we can get the [original runtime environment used for the first IOCCC] 13.

Compile-time Options:

The following command flags control the compilation:

• -DI="image.fs": Name of the disk image file. This must be created offline, and be of the correct size to avoid segmentation violations.
• -DA=4096: Setting of the console address switches. This tells the RIM bootloader where to load the boot image.
• -DS=0: Setting of the console data switches. The PDP-7 emulation can read these with the microcoded OAS (OR switches into AC) instruction. By proxy, the PDP-11 emulation can read them via the CSW device.
• -DW=MAP_PRIVATE: This sets the memory mapping for mmap. Setting to MAP_PRIVATE makes the disk image be copy-on-write. Setting it to MAP_SHARED makes the disk image be shareable. Do the latter if you want to preserve the disk contents between sessions.
• -DT=: List of initializers for the termios structure. The v0 UNIX expects the terminal to be in half-duplex mode, echoing its input, with swapped CR and NL. The PDP-11 UNIXes don't.
• -DX=5: The ASCII code of the control character that causes the simulation to abort. If set to 0, there is no abort code.
• -DY=128: Controls console I/O parity. If set to zero, the console is eight-bit clean. If set to 128, the high bit is set on keyboard reads and masked off on printer output ("mark" parity). UNIX v0 expects the latter.
• -DV=270: The size of the disk, in tracks. The UNIX v0 disk has 200 tracks (each has 80 sectors of 64 18-bit words). The PDP-11 UNIXes increase this to 270, to allow for the larger RK05 disk emulation (406 tracks of twelve 256-word sectors), plus the space for the 124K words of virtualized memory and the 8K words of emulator code.
• -DP="xxx": RIM bootstrap program paper tape image. Be careful with the quoting here -- there is at least three levels going on. In particular, you will need to escape $ as $$ to protect it from make.

What is the ASCII art supposed to be?

The ASCII art represents a torn piece of [paper tape] 14.

Acknowledgements

None of this could have been possible without the hard work of

• Warren Toomey and the other members of the [The Unix Heritage Society] 15
• Robert M. Supnik and the other contributors to [SimH] 16, the simulator for historic computer architectures. The number of times I needed to "Use the Source, Luke" on SimH to unravel some dark corner of these machines was uncountable.
• [Bitsavers] 17, which acquired, scanned and preserved all the manuals I spent many hours squinting at.
• Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernigan, M. D. McIlroy, J. F. Osssanna, Rudd Canaday and the other members of the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center who were responsible for the invention of UNIX, the C programming language, and the innumerable other innovations that we now take for granted as part of the modern software landscape. In particular, the [home page of the late Dennis Ritchie] 18 contained a trove of useful information on the evolution of UNIX and C and is recommended for perusal by others who share my peculiar retrocomputing affectations.

Finally, thanks to my spouse for putting up with the many hours I spent on this nonsense, and treating "I'm working on my IOCCC entry" as an acceptable answer to queries about how I was spending my free time. Similarly, I apologise to those friends and coworkers who had to listen to me complain about obscure corner-case bugs in my code. The obsession is over, at least until next time...

---

Copyright and CC BY-SA 4.0 License:

This file is Copyright (c) 2023 by Landon Curt Noll. All Rights Reserved. You are free to share and adapt this file under the terms of this license:

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For more information, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/