Re: [TUHS] Isaacson v Unix

[Ed Carp <erc@pobox.com>]

Nonsense from someone who evidently had some sort of axe to grind.
Kerninghan, Ritchie, Pine, Thonpson, Joy, and the rest being excluded
is like crediting everything that Sun has done to Scott McNealy.
Sounds like the marketers being credited with innovation.

On 1/5/19, William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com> wrote:
> Okay,  I will say it:  Fake News.
>
> The irony is that UNIX through programs like troff/nroff maintained
> extensive and elaborate mechanisms to support citations.  Indeed, there was
> a time when research required meticulous care of citations.
>
> In fact, I would argue that the importance of the great breakthrough UNIX
> papers by Thompson et al. in combination with the many excellent cites
> within are as significant of a work product as the UNIX proper.
>
> I used to think that the greatest attribute of a digital document was its
> inability to suffer decay, degrade or otherwise fade away like its analog
> analog.
>
> Yet, digital document decay occurs indirectly as we can see here with
> Isaacson’s work product: Revisionism by omission.
>
> It’s as simple as it is dangerous.   Since newer is ALWAYS better, the
> classic texts will eventually disappear replaced by garbage paradoxically
> “filled” with omissions.
>
> Bill Corcoran
> “One small step for main; one giant leap for mainkind.”
>
>
>
>> On Jan 4, 2019, at 9:27 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I was given a copy of Walter Isaacson's "The Innovators: How a Group of
>> Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution". It devotes
>> ten pages to Stallman and Gnu, Torvalds and Linux, even Tannebaum and
>> Minix, but never mentions Thompson and Ritchie. Unix is identified only
>> as a product from Bell Labs from which the others learned something--he
>> doesn't say what. I have heard also that Isaacson's "Idea Factory"
>> (about Bell Labs) barely mentions Unix. Is Isaacson blind, biased,
>> or merely brainwashed?
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Or maybe he just likes to tell stories, and didn't pick up all the
>> good ones about Ken. Isaacson describes spacewar, arguably the first
>> stage of computer-game innovation, at great length. At the same time,
>> all he has to say about early-stage operating systems is a single
>> sentence that credits John McCarthy with leading a time-sharing effort
>> at MIT. (In my recollection, McCarthy proseletized; Corbato led.) He
>> tells how ARPANET, which he says was mainly developed by BB&N, connected
>> time-shared computers, but breathes not a word about Berkeley's work,
>> without which ARPANET would have been an open circuit.
>>
>> "Innovators" won general critical praise. A couple of reviews predicted
>> it would become the standard of the field. However, an evidently
>> knowledgeable review in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing faulted
>> it for peddling familiar potted legends without really digging for
>> deeper insight. Regarding Thompson and Ritchie, it looks more like
>> overt suppression.
>>
>> Doug
>