Re: [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

["Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe@math.utah.edu>]

Clem Cole asks:

>> I wonder why Jay did his version?  Maybe he wanted more modern 
>> C features since the Snyder compiler would been based on a very 
>> early C dialect.

I never talked to Jay about his motivation for working on pcc for
TOPS-20.  I visited Ken Harrenstien at SRI, but regrettably, only
once.  I have great admiration for his work on kcc, and later, his
PDP-10 emulator (written in C, of course).

I suspect that the main reason was that in the early 1980s, we could
still see years of use of our PDP-10 systems in Computer Science and
the College of Science, yet, being Node 4 of the original 5 nodes of
the Arpanet, we were in frequent contact with Berkeley people who were
active in the BSD effort.

Besides our PDP-10s, we had several PDP-11s and VAXes that could run
Unix, so we wanted our software to run on all of those systems, and C
would be the obvious common programming language.  Also, the PC
revolution that started in roughly 1980 made it clear that computers
were going to get a lot cheaper, and a lot more numerous, so in
academia, we would phase out our Big Iron machines and replace them
with Unix workstations.
 
To help our users begin to make the transition to Unix, I wrote this
Rosetta Stone document:

	Unix for TOPS-20 Users
	[24-June-1987]
	http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/publications/1987/t20unix.pdf

I've not looked at it in years, and I might now cringe at parts, but
most of our users in the College of Science were not computer geeks,
but just scientists and mathematicians trying to do their research and
teaching, so they needed help.


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