[Info-vax] Current VMS engineering quality, was: Re: What's VMS up to these

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-03-18 20.54, JF Mezei wrote:
> David Froble wrote:
>
>> 2) Unix was developed at bell labs, some people know that
>
> Funny you should mention this.  When I worked at a bank the senior VP
> for IT told me that Unix had been invented by IBM. (This was a true blue
> IBM shop with IBM taking the bank VPs to lunch/golf all the time).
>
> It is possible that Bell labs collaborated with Berkele to develop Unix?
> or did they develop it all on their own with Berkeley developing their
> "me too" copy that was not as hindered with copyright ?

No. You got things very much backwards. Bell were writing on Unix for 
many years before Berkeley did anything. And when Berkeley did, it was 
as a set of patches to Unix. They didn't deliver a whole system for 
another bunch of years. Not until BSD 4.4 did Berkeley try to remove all 
Bell code from the sources, in order to produce a free version.

>> 3) Not that I'm a fan of Al Gore, but, hasn't that joke worn out yet?  All the man said
>> was that he was involved in the funding for R&D and implementation.
>
> I never actually heard what he said. Just heard that he claimed to have
> invented the Internet. I know he didn't "invent" it, but was always
> curious as to the true meaning of this.
>
> The internet did change radically while he was in office, going from
> military/educational funding to commercial operations. And I am curious
> to know what hand Al Gore had in that transformation.

This is probably on the internet in way more detail, but if I remember 
right, he was partly responsible for the funding of NSF, which took over 
as the Internet started to become a commercial entity instead of a pure 
academic one.

So he do have some small claim to fame in relation to the Internet, 
although not as big as he made claim to.

	Johnny