> The first publicly available version of Oracle Database (v2 released in 1979) was written in assembly for PDP-11.
I wonder if anybody still has a copy of Oracle v2 or v3?
Oldest I've ever seen on abandonware sites is Oracle 5.1 for DOS
> The mainframes at the time didn't have C compilers
Here's a 1975 Bell Labs memo mentioning that C compilers at the time existed for three machines [0] β PDP-11 UNIX, Honeywell 6000 GCOS, and "OS/370" (which is a bit of a misnomer, I think it actually means OS/VS2 β it mentions TSO on page 15, which rules out OS/VS1)
That said, I totally believe Oracle didn't know about the Bell Labs C compiler, and Bell Labs probably wouldn't share it if they did, and who knows if it had been kept up to date with newer versions of C, etc...
SAS paid Lattice to port their C compiler to MVS and CMS circa 1983/1984, so probably around the same time Oracle was porting Oracle to IBM mainframes β because I take it they also didn't know about or couldn't get access to the Bell Labs compiler
Whereas, Eric Schmidt succeeded in getting Bell Labs to hand over their mainframe C compiler, which was used by the Princeton Unix port, which went on to evolve into Amdahl UTS. So definitely Princeton/Amdahl had a mainframe C compiler long before SAS/Lattice/Oracle did... but maybe they didn't know about it or have access to it either. And even though the original Bell Labs C compiler was for MVS (aka OS/VS2 Release 2βor its predecessor SVS aka OS/VS2 Release 1), its Amdahl descendant may have produced output for Unix only
I assume whatever C compiler AT&T's TSS-based Unix port (UNIX/370) used was also a descendant of the Bell Labs 370 C compiler. But again, it probably produced code only for Unix not for MVS, and probably wasn't available outside of AT&T either
I wonder if anybody still has a copy of Oracle v2 or v3?
Oldest I've ever seen on abandonware sites is Oracle 5.1 for DOS
> The mainframes at the time didn't have C compilers
Here's a 1975 Bell Labs memo mentioning that C compilers at the time existed for three machines [0] β PDP-11 UNIX, Honeywell 6000 GCOS, and "OS/370" (which is a bit of a misnomer, I think it actually means OS/VS2 β it mentions TSO on page 15, which rules out OS/VS1)
That said, I totally believe Oracle didn't know about the Bell Labs C compiler, and Bell Labs probably wouldn't share it if they did, and who knows if it had been kept up to date with newer versions of C, etc...
SAS paid Lattice to port their C compiler to MVS and CMS circa 1983/1984, so probably around the same time Oracle was porting Oracle to IBM mainframes β because I take it they also didn't know about or couldn't get access to the Bell Labs compiler
Whereas, Eric Schmidt succeeded in getting Bell Labs to hand over their mainframe C compiler, which was used by the Princeton Unix port, which went on to evolve into Amdahl UTS. So definitely Princeton/Amdahl had a mainframe C compiler long before SAS/Lattice/Oracle did... but maybe they didn't know about it or have access to it either. And even though the original Bell Labs C compiler was for MVS (aka OS/VS2 Release 2βor its predecessor SVS aka OS/VS2 Release 1), its Amdahl descendant may have produced output for Unix only
I assume whatever C compiler AT&T's TSS-based Unix port (UNIX/370) used was also a descendant of the Bell Labs 370 C compiler. But again, it probably produced code only for Unix not for MVS, and probably wasn't available outside of AT&T either
[0] https://archive.org/details/ThePortableCLibrary_May75/page/n...