20th Anniversary of the First Port of UNIX

Nowadays, the portability of UNIX is taken for granted. The first ports of UNIX were audacious projects. Two teams independently succeeded with ports of UNIX at about the same time, only to find out about each other when the ports were finished. Both teams used different techniques for porting, and these talks will present the strategies used and how they hold up to current porting practice.

The UNIX code was so well designed that it could be picked up and ported without any consultations with the authors of the code. Reinfelds and his research team ported UNIX to Interdata 7/32 at the University of Wollongong in Australia, where Richard Miller proposed an innovative implementation of the port and proved its effectiveness by single handedly porting the kernel code and most applications. The Wollongong port later became the first computer vendor-supported UNIX.

Johnson and Ritchie were doing the port at Bell Labs on Interdata 8/32. Porting Unix required that C "get serious" about portability. Portability concerns led directly to such innovations as separate name spaces for structure members, sizeof, and indirectly to tools such as lint and social conventions such as the use of header files. This talk will also dicuss places where we were less successful, notably alignment, byte order, and bit fields.