segaloco
Experienced Member
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2023
- Messages
- 483
I was curious if anyone is aware of any surviving or new-age tools for the MAC-8 (WE212, BellMAC-8) 8-bit CPU? The canonical development environment in the late 70s and early 80s was USG UNIX, with the usual suspects as far as UNIX development utilities being available, all prefixed m8 (e.g. m8as, m8cc, m8dis, m8ld). These are documented in some Bell System Technical Journal articles as well as in the internal Bell Laboratories editions of the UNIX Release 5.0 and System V Release 2 literature, and my understanding is they are one of the earliest if not the earliest in the "SGS" (System Generation Software) line of UNIX development utilities. Some BSTJ reading suggests an internal 8086 project at the labs may have actually spawned the SGS suite, which in turn was based on the standard (but varied in implementation) PDP-11, VAX-11, and Interdata 8/32 variations on these utilities built realtively independently for UNIX on those architectures. The same SGS base was then used for producing the 68k, i386, NS32000, WE32x00, etc. variants shipped with various AT&T System V releases.
Luckily the documentation of the ISA survives so it is possible to build up these components from scratch, and the expected binary formats are also documented in the UNIX manuals I've described above, so building a set of assembly/object utilities should be possible.
Anywho, thanks for any pointers! If I manage to get any sort of utlities built I'll be sure to share them here for other MAC-TUTOR and MAC-8 nerds.
Luckily the documentation of the ISA survives so it is possible to build up these components from scratch, and the expected binary formats are also documented in the UNIX manuals I've described above, so building a set of assembly/object utilities should be possible.
Anywho, thanks for any pointers! If I manage to get any sort of utlities built I'll be sure to share them here for other MAC-TUTOR and MAC-8 nerds.