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

[Bob Eager]

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

Here's a couple, for starters...

> UNIX was ported to PDP-11, using C, about a decade before VMS
>    was started.

In 1973. Are you saying that VMS was started in 1983? I think not...

>  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.

It was a research project for many years. It had to be pried from their 
hands to be used outside Bell Labs.

>  The handwriting on the wall showed that there was
>    clearly no future for C and/or UNIX.

It survives, though.

>    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

AT&T ported it to the VAX before that.

> added virtual memory

AT&T did that first.

>  added TCP/IP

There was an ARPA grant for that, I believe.

> 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.

But they weren't selling BSD at all....it wasn't a commercial product 
until much later. They were selling the AT&T version.

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