Re: [TUHS] Surprised about Unix System V in the 80's - so sparse!

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2021 at 05:29:40PM -0400, Henry Bent wrote:
> > I mean, mail without Internet is pretty useless, althouhg I understand it
> > could be useful for inter-company communications. And yes, it had vi and
> > the
> > Bourne Shell. But still, it feels very very limited, this Xenix version,
> > from a user's point of view.
> 
> Which might well explain why Xenix failed to gain much ground with normal
> folks at home.  If you used a UNIX at work, sure, you might want to pay the
> money to have it at home.  But why spend the $ for an operating system that
> didn't have widespread application development?

My first home Unix machine was a 3B1.  It was great.  There is just
something so bloody limiting about DOS when you compare it to Unix.
Unix was for developers, DOS was for end users.  Entirely different
beasts.

That said, System V was very limited compared to BSD.  BSD was much 
closer to what we have today, it felt friendly, System V felt sort
of corporate.  To me at least.

--lm