Comment by raverbashing
3 years ago
> PDP-whatever is still usable today on your laptop running Windows 10
No, it isn't. Go on. Go ahead and try
See it break in a million weird ways. (Or, for a start, it will have the K&R C format, which is a pain to maintain)
"If your computer doesn't have 8-bit bytes" at this day and age? It belongs in a dumpster, sorry.
(I think the only "modern" arch that does this is PIC, and even only for program data - where you're not running anything "officially" C89 or later)
When I first learned C, it was K&R, pre-ANSI with old style function parameters. It is trivial to convert to ANSI C. The truth is C has barely changed in decades.
You should take a look at plan9port - a bunch of userspace tools from Plan 9, carefully ported to Linux with few changes. Maybe that's not PDP-whatever, but it is Sun-whatever. Either way, it's code that was written decades ago for a dead architecture.