PDP-8 Small-C Compiler (2012)
One of the best resources I&#x27;ve found for the PDP-8: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homepage.cs.uiowa.edu&#x2F;~jones&#x2F;pdp8&#x2F;man&#x2F;index.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;homepage.cs.uiowa.edu&#x2F;~jones&#x2F;pdp8&#x2F;man&#x2F;index.html</a><p>To give an idea of why this is so hard, an PDP-8 without any add-ons has just two registers: a program counter and an accumulator. Similar to the MOS 6502, you instead used the first part of memory, the &#x27;zero page,&#x27; as a register file. Self-modifying code was used to do subroutines, as was rather common at the time. You&#x27;d load the return address into the accumulator, call the subroutine, and then the subroutine would store the return address for later inside of its own code. A stock PDP-8 also had only 4096 12-bit words to work with <i>at most</i>.<p>The PDP-8 was envisioned more as a piece of lab equipment, not as a general-purpose computer. That an operating system could run on it astonished its creators.