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From: scottl@convergent.com (Scott Lurndal)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: UNIX vs. the world (again) (was: Compilation listing from Sun ...)
Message-ID: <5698@risky.Convergent.COM>
Date: 20 Jun 91 22:20:42 GMT
References: <1991Jun15.143436.5574@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <25791@lanl.gov> <RI0CQT5@xds13.ferranti.com>
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Reply-To: scottl@convergent.com (Scott Lurndal)
Organization: Unisys Network Computing Group
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In article <RI0CQT5@xds13.ferranti.com>, peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
|> In article <25791@lanl.gov> jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
|> > Nope.  That's an after effect.  The _reason_ UNIX became popular was for
|> > no _technical_ advantage at all.  It became popular because, at a critical
|> > time in the 70's, it was _free_ and _open_ and avalable on the _cheapest_
|> > useful hardware: PDP-8/11 and VAXen.
|> 
|> Jim, you don't help your argument by making major technical blunders. UNIX
|> has never run on a PDP-8. It ran on the PDP-11, and the earliest ports were
|> actually to other 16-bit minicomputers like the Interdata. The VAX at that
|> time was *not* a cheap machine.
|> 
Truth, as the VAX didn't exist when UNIX was developed (except as a gleem
in Ken Olson's eye).

To quote the BSTJ, Vol 57, No 6, Part 2:

pp 1899:  The UNIX story begins with Ken Thompson's work on a cast-off 
	  PDP-7 minicomputer in 1969.  [...]

pp 1900:  Until mid-1977, the UNIX operating system and its variants ran
	  only on computers of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11
	  family.  In an interesting exercise in portability, Johnson 
	  and Richie exploited the machine-independence [really! -ed] 
	  of C to move the operating system and the bulk of its software
	  to a quite different Interdata machine.