Newsgroups: comp.os.xinu
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re:  disable macro in V6 XINU
Message-ID: <1988Nov6.031705.18297@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <8811031232.AA03013@merlin.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: Sun, 6 Nov 88 03:17:05 GMT

In article <8811031232.AA03013@merlin.cs.purdue.edu> comer@purdue.edu (Douglas Comer) writes:
>  >>	     followed by an "r 20" on the line immediately below it....
>
>That's an assembler error messages (no kidding, that's what the original UNIX
>C compiler used -- really short, cryptic messages)...

Actually, the *compiler* did a fair-to-middling job on error messages.
The *assembler*, however, was a different story, at least partly because
it was very old -- much older than the compiler -- and had to be able
to run on really small machines.  The first PDP11 Unix ran on an 11/20
with 24KB of physical memory and no MMU (meaning that both the kernel
and the biggest user process had to fit in physical memory), which
meant that the assembler had to run in 8KB or so.  Every byte counted.
-- 
The Earth is our mother.        |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Our nine months are up.         |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu