Re: please help me!!! I need GCC 1.0

[Dan Kegel <dank at kegel dot com>]

Joe Buck wrote:
> There's probably somebody out there with an old 9-track tape in a closet
> that RMS wrote personally ...

Nah, RMS had someone else cutting tapes.
I had some fun looking through old copies of the "GNU's Bulletins"
just now at http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/01/bull01.txt said in 1986:
"Although I have a portable C and Pascal compiler, it has a serious
drawback: it is a very large program, and intrinsically cannot be made
smaller.  It is also very hard to bootstrap.
The problem is that most of the compiler is written in Pastel, a
super-hairy extended Pascal, and it is also the sole compiler for that
language.  To make it smaller, we must eliminate the hair needed to
compile Pastel; then we will not be able to compile Pastel, so it must
all be rewritten into C."

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/02/nb.html said in Jan 1987,
"I am now working on finishing a new portable optimizing C compiler.
It supports the Oct 1986 draft of ANSI C and has compiled both
itself and GNU Emacs."

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/03/bull3.html said in June '87
for the first time that a tape with a beta version of gcc was available.

http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/04/bull4.html said in Feb '88
that Gnu C was becoming stable, had been ported to several targets,
and was at version 1.17.

There are plenty of names in those bulletins of people who worked
on that early gcc or who distributed tapes; I bet at least one
of them still has an old copy somewhere of a tape made somewhere between
June '87 and
- Dan

--
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