Re: Linux isn't an operating system

Johannes Stille (johannes@titan.westfalen.de)
Fri, 15 Mar 96 10:53 MET

leisner@sdsp.mc.xerox.com wrote:
[...]
>> I beg to differ - It could have been done without GNU, without GCC (Minix
>> had non GNU 386 compilers before Linux). Richard created (well many might
[...]
>I found the Minix C compiler quite poor, I ended up cross-compiling
>Minix with aztec C...
>
>The point was, the Minix C compiler was not a "free tool", you needed to
>buy the amsterdam compiler kit for $1000... and Minix only become free
>recently.
[...]

The original author didn't refer to the minix C compiler (which only
produced 8086/80286 code), but to bcc.

bcc to the best of my knowledge stands for Bruce's C Compiler; I think
it was written by Bruce Evans who works on one of the *BSD projects now.
It came in a 8086 and a 80386 version, the latter was used for the
original Minix/386 efforts. It consisted of a complete compiler/assembler/
linker set, as opposed to Minix cc, which combined assembler and linker
into asld that produced binaries from .s files, thus assembling
libraries again for each program.

AFAIK, the as86 and ld86 programs used for the Linux/386 realmode
startup code are from bcc.
BTW, does the Linux/8086 project know about or use bcc?

Johannes