Jerod Santo changelog.com/posts

Explore a piece of Unix history: Dennis Ritchie's earliest C compilers

Roger Roach, a.k.a. Mortdeus, was researching the history of Unix and Bell Labs when he discovered an article by the late Dennis Richie explaining two of his earliest C compilers which had been recovered from some old DECTapes.

These artifacts were of too much historic importance for Mortdeus to leave just collecting dust in some obscure corner of the web, so he aggregated the source files and posted them to GitHub as legacy-cc.

The README states:

These are not capable of being compiled today with modern c compilers like gcc. I am only posting these here for the enjoyment and reminiscing of the spark that ignited a soon to be trillion dollar industry. Enjoy. :)

Mortdeus gave 3 reasons for posting the source to GitHub:

  1. Exposure
  2. Convenience (the articles links to each file separately)
  3. Collaborative learning

His plan appears to have worked. The repo on GitHub is growing in popularity very quickly!


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