Re: [Tack-devel] [Spam] MINIX 1.5 and ACK

[Jacobs, C.J.H. <c.j...@vu...>]

> On 9 Mar 2019, at 19:14, u-...@ae... wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Mar 09, 2019 at 12:08:09AM +0100, David Given wrote:
>> That's known as ACKPACK, and it's a special cut-down version of the ACK
>> which forked off a while ago. I don't know anything about that one.
>> 
>> +u...@ae... <u-...@ae...>, you maintain ACKPACK, don't you? Do you
>> have a download site for it?
>> 
>> 
>> On Fri, 8 Mar 2019 at 23:59 Christian Groessler <ch...@gr...> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi,
>>> 
>>> I'm new here.
>>> 
>>> I've got the MINIX 1.5 distribution (from back then, supporting PC 8086
>>> and 80286, and M68K Amiga, Atari, Mac) which includes the source code of
>>> most of the system. The notably exception is the source code of the
>>> compiler.
>>> 
>>> Is the source code of this version of ACK publicly available?
> 
> It would be a challenge to figure out how exactly the compiler binaries
> supplied with Minix 1.5 were built. I doubt that this information survived
> since then.

Good question! I survived, and I produced those binaries back then. But this was a very long time ago,
and my memory has never been any good... nor are my archiving skills... When I find some time, I’ll
see if I can do some digging. From what I remember, the only real problem was getting the compiler front-end
to fit in 64K instruction space and 64K data space. For that, we took out the C preprocessor (which was/is built-in
into the C frontend) and made it a separate pass, and we also took out the floating-point library. Other than that,
I don’t remember exactly, but I think it was just a little bit of tweaking.

Best wishes,

Ceriel Jacobs