no gnu
no gnu
Posted Aug 21, 2009 21:09 UTC (Fri) by AJWM (guest, #15888)In reply to: no gnu by rsidd
Parent article: 40 years of Unix (BBC)
Compiler aside, the core userland tools were re-implemented over and over in many different languages. Kernighan & Plauger's Software Tools (1976) described many of them with source code in Ratfor, a C-like preprocessor for FORTRAN, and the later Software Tools in Pascal (1981) did the same in Pascal. Pascal compilers were almost ubiquitous at the time, and pretty easy to implement (I had a version of Wirth's that was about 3000 lines of Pascal).
I had a reasonably complete (for day-to-day use) 'nix-like userland on a 60-bit CDC Cyber 70 running NOS back in the day (circa 1980), based on Software Tools, several years before FSF and GNU. The real contribution of the latter was the GPL.