From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: doug@cs.dartmouth.edu (Doug McIlroy) Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 21:49:48 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped Message-ID: <201406190149.s5J1nmP1004744@stowe.cs.dartmouth.edu> 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 > Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped > Message-ID: > 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 > 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