From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy)
Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 21:49:48 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201406190149.s5J1nmP1004744@stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu> (raw)
They pitched a PDP-10 for a similar reason--hardware to build a
bigger Unix on. When a small pot of end-of-year money appeared,
they took a PDP-11 instead--serendipitously, because university
folks started proving this elegant system on cheap hardware
in many projects in small labs, which they never could have
done had the system existed on a PDP-10 mainframe. While
upper management did not directly cause Unix to be built,
their decisions to abandon Multics and not to buy a PDP-10
were notable causes for its creation and spread.
Doug
> Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:43:51 -0700
> From: iking at killthewabbit.org
> To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org,Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped
> Message-ID: <ef723f8a-52b6-4810-be59-1837c75b1da3.maildroid at localhost>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Interesting - what's your source? It was also my understanding they used the -7 'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a PDP-10, which had TOPS-10. - Ian
>
> Sent from my android device.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu>
> To: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
> Sent: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 4:06 AM
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped
>
>
> > It's always been a bit of a mystery to me why Thompson and Ritchie decided they needed to write a new executive - UNICS - rather than use DECsys.
>
> It was the other way around. They had conceived a clean, simple, yet
> powerful, operating system and needed a machine to build it on. A
> cast-off PDP-7 happened to be at hand.
>
> Doug
next reply other threads:[~2014-06-19 1:49 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 25+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2014-06-19 1:49 Doug McIlroy [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2014-06-20 13:05 Douglas Comer
2014-06-18 21:21 Noel Chiappa
2014-06-18 22:55 ` John Cowan
2014-06-18 17:48 Douglas Comer
2014-06-18 22:38 ` Cory Smelosky
2014-06-18 15:03 Norman Wilson
2014-06-18 14:00 ` Larry McVoy
2014-06-18 16:58 ` Cory Smelosky
2014-06-18 15:55 ` Larry McVoy
2014-06-18 15:14 ` Dan Cross
2014-06-18 16:50 ` scj
2014-06-18 18:43 ` John Cowan
2014-06-18 11:06 Doug McIlroy
2014-06-18 14:43 ` iking
2014-06-18 14:48 ` Dan Cross
2014-06-18 18:21 ` A. P. Garcia
2014-06-15 18:19 Norman Wilson
2014-06-16 16:13 ` iking
2014-06-16 22:01 ` Gregg Levine
2014-06-17 1:38 ` John Cowan
2014-06-17 1:56 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2014-06-17 3:13 ` iking
2014-06-17 12:14 ` John Cowan
2014-06-18 16:21 ` Ian King
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