Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sei!firth
From: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Porting OSes (was DEC RISC Architecture)
Message-ID: <9110@fy.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 90 15:54:49 GMT
References: <4462@trantor.harris-atd.com> <107038@convex.convex.com> <15007@hydra.gatech.EDU> <10734@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <3607@stl.stc.co.uk>
Reply-To: firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)
Organization: Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 17

In article <10734@pt.cs.cmu.edu> lindsay@gandalf.cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay) writes:

>The whole idea of porting an OS was new in the mid-70's

To add more to Tom's refutation of this: Strachey's group at Oxford
were looking at portable operating systems in the late '60s.  They
published a lot of papers and monographs on their work between 1968
and about 1972, including the complete source of an OS ('OSpub')
written in BCPL and running on their Modular-1 machine.

Meanwhile, at the Other Place, Martin Richards and his students
were following the path that led to Tripos in (I believe) 1975.

So a better chronology is: the idea of porting an OS was new in the
mid 60s; by 1970 several different groups had realised that the
real issue was not porting an existing OS but designing an OS to
be portable; by the mid 70s such OS were a reality.