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

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <7lr0bbF3e5hd8U15 at mid.individual.net>,
	Bob Eager <rde42 at spamcop.net> writes:
> 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...
 
Thank you.  I was just going to say the same.  Sometimes I really wonder
what kind of an alternate reality  some of the people live in. 

bill
 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>