Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

[Ed Carp <erc@pobox.com>]

> All that being said, I don't think this argument applies in any way to
> Bell Labs and Unix.  Unix was "applied usefully" long before Stallman
> and Torvalds came along.  Not crediting its inventors is inexcusable.

Completely agree!

On 1/5/19, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1/4/19, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>
>> In the case of Steve Jobs, Isaacson tells not just that the Alto system
>> from Xerox inspired him, but also who its star creators were: Lampson,
>> Thacker and Kay. But then he stomps on them: "Once again, the greatest
>> innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs,
>> but from the people who applied them usefully." While he very describes
>> innovation as a continuum from invention through engineering to
>> marketing,
>> he seems to be more impressed by the later stages.
>
> I would argue that Isaacson does have a point here.  After Lampson
> left Xerox PARC he set up a similar outfit at Digital'--the Western
> Research Lab (WRL).  They did a lot of interesting work in the area of
> software development tools.  I was working in the software tools
> engineering group at the time, and we would have loved to take WRL's
> work and to incorporate it in our products.  But we couldn't.  Why?
> Because they wrote everything in Modula 3, and we were using BLISS.
> It was too expensive and time-consuming to do the translation.  If
> they had worked in BLISS, we could have just taken their code and run
> with it.  From my perspective it looked as though they were
> deliberately setting up barriers to prevent us from sullying their
> research by actually turning it into useful products.
>
> In one memo to DEC's engineering staff, Gordon Bell proposed a "Xerox
> PARC" award to the R&D project that advanced the state-of-the-art the
> most while simultaneously advancing DEC's bottom line the least.
>
> Yes, PARC invented the modern windows-based GUI, but, as with so many
> PARC innovations, Xerox did nothing with it.  Based on how the PARC
> alumni at WRL behaved at DEC,I would argue that this was the fault of
> PARC as much as of Xerox management.
>
> All that being said, I don't think this argument applies in any way to
> Bell Labs and Unix.  Unix was "applied usefully" long before Stallman
> and Torvalds came along.  Not crediting its inventors is inexcusable.
>
> -Paul W.
>