A collection of NCUBE UNIX utilities

Abstract

When we started this work, there was no C compiler available on the NCUBE. (Now there is one, from Caine, Farber, and Gordon, Inc., and it works well, but it has some restrictions on addressing, because of the underlying Intel 80286 processor, that make it unsuitable for porting certain of the UNIX utilities.) Thus we sought out a C cross-compiler, and found one from AT&T. We obtained the necessary UNIX source licenses and the sources for AT&T’s System V/iAPX286 UNIX cross-development system. That system is intended to run on a VAX running System V UNIX, but our VAX runs Ultrix, so we ported the cross-development system to Ultrix. This involved, among other things, making hybrid versions of certain UNIX utilities, hybrids with System V ancestry but adapted to run on a Berkeley UNIX file system. It was necessary to do this for lex, yacc, m4, cut, sh, and make before we were able to build the C cross-compiler and cross-linker, because, for each of these utilities, there was some small but crucial difference in behavior between the Ultrix (Berkeley UNIX) version and the System V version. Once these hybrid utilities were in place, we were able to make the cross-linker and cross-compiler