[HECnet] Thrashing about...

On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 4:36 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote: ?I believe you, I was not certainly not following it in those days, I'll ask Leslie what the scoop was. I believe she was still managing TLG then, if not she certainly knows who was. As Paul K said, the other languages were not hard, but it was they had a couple of issues, the big one being address space. The other was the different runtimes, and that was expensive and then there was just the tools. Paul W loves to tell the stories about moving the VMS linkers to Ultrix to support the Fortran compiler. TLG had to cross compiled (originally from the 10 then larger the Vax), but it was not the prettiest development environment. I always give Rich Grove and that team credit, with Gem, they had X front-ends, and Y back ends, running Z different OSses, with architectures from 16-64 bits and including parallel code generators. I still do not know of a compiler suite that has lived as well. To quote Rich, the Intel compilers, have the DEC Gem dna ground up and slowly re-injected over the years. A number of us have wondered, if the Gem had not been in BLISS, if Intel would have had the guts to keep them and not stay with their own when those folks joined. ?