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Comment by tanelpoder | Hacker News Reader

The first publicly available version of Oracle Database (v2 released in 1979) was written in assembly for PDP-11. Then Oracle rewrote v3 in C (1983) for portability across platforms. The mainframes at the time didn't have C compilers, so instead of writing a mainframe-specific database product in a different language (COBOL?), they just wrote a C compiler for mainframes too.

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UNIX was ported to the System/370 in 1980, but it ran on top of TSS, which I understand was an obscure product.

"Most of the design for implementing the UNIX system for System/370 was done in 1979, and coding was completed in 1980. The first production system, an IBM 3033AP, was installed at the Bell Laboratories facility at Indian Hill in early 1981."

https://web.archive.org/web/20240930232326/https://www.bell-...

Interesting. Summer 84/85 (maybe 85/86) I used a port of PCC to System/360 (done, I believe, by Scott Kristjanson) on the University of British Columbia mainframes (Amdahls running MTS). I was working on mail software, so I had to deal with EBCDIC/ASCII issues, which was no fun.

I sometimes wonder if that compiler has survived anywhere.

z/OS 3.1 is certified for UNIX 95, if this list is correct:

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/index2.html

That would include a C compiler, but yours is probably on tape somewhere.

Linux has been on this list, courtesy of two Chinese companies.

> The first publicly available version of Oracle Database (v2 released in 1979) was written in assembly for PDP-11.

I wonder if anybody still has a copy of Oracle v2 or v3?

Oldest I've ever seen on abandonware sites is Oracle 5.1 for DOS

> The mainframes at the time didn't have C compilers

Here's a 1975 Bell Labs memo mentioning that C compilers at the time existed for three machines [0] – PDP-11 UNIX, Honeywell 6000 GCOS, and "OS/370" (which is a bit of a misnomer, I think it actually means OS/VS2 – it mentions TSO on page 15, which rules out OS/VS1)

That said, I totally believe Oracle didn't know about the Bell Labs C compiler, and Bell Labs probably wouldn't share it if they did, and who knows if it had been kept up to date with newer versions of C, etc...

SAS paid Lattice to port their C compiler to MVS and CMS circa 1983/1984, so probably around the same time Oracle was porting Oracle to IBM mainframes – because I take it they also didn't know about or couldn't get access to the Bell Labs compiler

Whereas, Eric Schmidt succeeded in getting Bell Labs to hand over their mainframe C compiler, which was used by the Princeton Unix port, which went on to evolve into Amdahl UTS. So definitely Princeton/Amdahl had a mainframe C compiler long before SAS/Lattice/Oracle did... but maybe they didn't know about it or have access to it either. And even though the original Bell Labs C compiler was for MVS (aka OS/VS2 Release 2–or its predecessor SVS aka OS/VS2 Release 1), its Amdahl descendant may have produced output for Unix only

I assume whatever C compiler AT&T's TSS-based Unix port (UNIX/370) used was also a descendant of the Bell Labs 370 C compiler. But again, it probably produced code only for Unix not for MVS, and probably wasn't available outside of AT&T either

[0] https://archive.org/details/ThePortableCLibrary_May75/page/n...

I very much doubt anyone from the time wants to talk about it, but there is substantial bad blood about Oracle and Ingres. I believe not all of this story is in the public domain, nor capable of being discussed without lawyers.

Writing something that large in assembly is pretty crazy, even in 1979!

Keep in mind, Oracle was designed to run with 128KB of RAM (no swapping). So it was really tens of thousands of lines, not millions.

Was it actually that uncommon back then? My understanding is that there were other things (including Unix itself, since it predated C and was only rewritten in it later) written in assembly initially back in the 70s. Maybe Oracle is much larger compared to other things done this way than I realize, or maybe the veneration of Unix history has just been part of my awareness for too long, but for some reason hearing that this happened with Oracle doesn't seem to hit as hard for me as it seems for you. It's possible become so accustomed to something historically significant that I fail to be impressed by a similar feat, but I genuinely thought that assembly was just the language used for stuff low-level for a long time (not that I'm saying there weren't other systems languages besides C, but my recollection is having read that for a while some people were skeptical of the idea of using any high-level language in the place of assembly for systems programming).

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