
The First Unix Port (1998) [pdf] - jsnell
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/bits/Interdata/32bit/unix/univWollongong_v6/miller.pdf
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jdblair
I remember hearing this paper presented at USENIX 1998, in New Orleans.

IIRC, the most interesting part of the presentation was a slide titled "Is
UNIX portable?" Miller said, of course it is, I ported it! But then he showed
a chart with the number of lines of code in the distribution and the number he
had to replace for the Interdata mini, and the proportion was quite large! His
punch line was that yes, he had ported UNIX, but it wasn't quite so clear that
you could call it portable.

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Taniwha
I did something similar, porting first V6 then V7 to the Vax some time
starting in '79 ... The process started with writing a tar clone in fortran to
get the C source off of the tape, luckily I had a C compiler for VMS ...

The result was a Unix that ran VAX native in a VM, each copy ran in a single
VMS process ... Then I did V7, much easier the second time around

~~~
Taniwha
Oh, and that famous comment "you're not expected to understand this" ....
Completely obvious about 2 months in when you come at it from the right
direction (swapping a process in)

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luckydude
People interested in this will really like this:

[http://www.tuhs.org/](http://www.tuhs.org/)

~~~
simula67
Or this :
[https://landley.net/history/mirror/](https://landley.net/history/mirror/)

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pmarin
Richard Miller is the same gentleman who many years later ported Plan 9 to the
Raspberry Pi.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7ZELOUIyvw)

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enf
Another paper disputes Miller's claim to priority:
[https://archive.org/details/first-unix-
port](https://archive.org/details/first-unix-port)

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joe_the_user
As far as I can tell, the paper you link definitely confirms the essence of
what Miller Says.

The end of the link says _" We here at Bell Laboratories were truly dumfounded
when this visitor from an unknown school in Australia reported his elegant
procedure and remarkable success. Our own people took considerably longer to
move UNIX to an Interdata machine, not because they were not as clever but
because they had a different objective: a portable Unix rather than a UNIX
port. But I think they'd . have blinked before undertaking the heroic effort
that Richard Miller did and he did not even have a Unix computer to port from.
"_

I cannot see that as any sort of dispute.

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enf
OK, good point. I probably misread it.

