[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Bob Eager]

On Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:06:59 -0600, Bob Koehler wrote:

>> And when it was decided for them, then C was not available (at least
>> according to many C was invented to port Unix to PDP-11).
> 
>    UNIX was ported to PDP-11, using C, about a decade before VMS was
>    started.  So DEC could have written a C compiler for VAX and large
>    parts of VMS in C if they'd wanted to.  DEC didn't write a C compiler
>    for VAX early on because no one outside of a few UNIX users were
>    using C.  UNIX was the broken down OS that AT&T couldn't find
>    customers for.  The handwriting on the wall showed that there was
>    clearly no future for C and/or UNIX.
> 
>    Then AT&T let some kids at Berkley have a copy of the UNIX source.
>    They ran it on PDP-11, ported it to VAX, added virtual memory, added
>    TCP/IP, and somehow got others interested in it.  Start up vendors
>    like Sun and Apollo found they could throw together some commodity
>    hardware, toss BSD UNIX on it much faster than they could write their
>    own OS, and sell workstations.  When the vendors switched to RISC
>    they blew away the performance of VAXen and people grudgingly learned
>    to survive using an OS with a late 1960's human interface, writing
>    code in a Frankenstein language that escaped from the lab, on
>    hardware that could grind numbers fast and cheap.

There are so many inaccuracies there I don't even know where to start...



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