ANSI C
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| PDP -7 |
In
the 1960s Ritchie worked, with several other employees of Bell Labs (AT&T),
on a project called Multics. The goal of the project was to develop an
operating system for a large computer that could be used by a thousand users. In
1969 AT&T (Bell Labs) withdrew from the project, because the project could
not produce an economically useful system. So the employees of Bell Labs (AT&T)
had to search for another project to work on (mainly Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken
Thompson).
Ken
Thompson began to work on the development of a new file system. He wrote, a
version of the new file system for the DEC PDP-7, in assembler. (The new file
system was also used for the game Space Travel). Soon they began to make
improvements and add expansions. (They used there knowledge from the Multics project
to add improvements). After a while a complete system was born. Brian W. Kernighan
called the system UNIX, a sarcastic reference to Multics. The whole system was
still written in assembly code.
Besides
assembler and Fortran, UNIX also had an interpreter for the programming
language B. ( The B language is derived directly from Martin Richards BCPL). The
language B was developed in 1969-70 by Ken Thompson. In the early days computer
code was written in assembly code. To perform a specific task, you had to write
many pages of code. A high-level language like B made it possible to write the
same task in just a few lines of code. The language B was used for further
development of the UNIX system. Because of the high-level of the B language, code
could be produced much faster, then in assembly.
A
drawback of the B language was that it did not know data-types. (Everything was
expressed in machine words). Another functionality that the B language did not
provide was the use of “structures”. The lag of these things formed the reason
for Dennis M. Ritchie to develop the programming language C. So in 1971-73
Dennis M. Ritchie turned the B language into the C language, keeping most of
the language B syntax while adding data-types and many other changes. The C language
had a powerful mix of high-level functionality and the detailed features
required to program an operating system. Therefore many of the UNIX components
were eventually rewritten in C (the Unix kernel itself was rewritten in 1973 on
a DEC PDP-11).
The
programming language C was written down, by Kernighan and Ritchie, in a now
classic book called “The C Programming Language, 1st edition”. (Kernighan has
said that he had no part in the design of the C language: “It’s entirely Dennis
Ritchie’s work”. But he is the author of the famous “Hello, World” program and
many other UNIX programs).
For
years the book “The C Programming Language, 1st edition” was the standard on
the language C. In 1983 a committee was formed by the American National
Standards Institute (ANSI)
to
develop a modern definition for the programming language C (ANSI X3J11). In 1988
they delivered the final standard definition ANSI C. (The standard was based on
the book from K&R 1st ed.).
The
standard ANSI C made little changes on the original design of the C language. (They
had to make sure that old programs still worked with the new standard). Later
on, the ANSI C standard was adopted by the International Standards Organization
(ISO). The correct term should there fore be ISO C, but everybody still calls
it ANSI C.
MUD
Short
for Multi-User Dungeon, MUD is an online, text-based, virtual environment first
created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle in 1978. MUD's later became global
in the MUD was known as MAD, which was created in 1984 and ran across BITNET. In
the picture is an example of Aardwolf, a more recent MUD that can still be
played on computers today.
Today,
there are still hundreds of multi-user dungeons that can be played through your
Internet browser, connecting to another server, or by downloading software to
your computer
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| MUD |
BITNET
Short for Because It's There
Network, BITNET is an U.S. University network founded in 1981 that was first
established between the University of New York and the Yale University. In 1986,
BITNET II was created to help bandwidth needs, which later merged with CSNET to
form CREN in 1988.
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| BITNET |
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