Re: Microsoft and Xenix.

Joel Jaeggli
2001-06-25T15:11:59Z

On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Rob Landley wrote:

> On Saturday 23 June 2001 23:07, Mike Castle wrote:
> > On Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 09:41:29PM -0500, Wayne.Brown@altec.com wrote:
> > > Ah, yes, the RT/PC. That brings back some fond memories. My first
> > > exposure to Unix was with AIX on the RT. I still have some of those
> > > weird-sized RT AIX manuals around somewhere...
> >
> > We always ran AOS on RT's. Actually, the server was the only RT, the rest
> > were some other model that was basically a PS/2 (286) that booted DOS, then
> > booted the other same chip that the RT used that was on a daughter card.
> >
> > AOS was basically IBM's version of BSD. Academic Operating System.
>
> Now if somebody here could just point me to a decent reference on A/UX -
> Apple's mid-80's version of Unix (for the early macintosh, I believe...)
>
> A big thing I'm trying to show in my book is that Unix has been, for almost
> thirty years, the standard against which everything else was compared. Even
> when it wasn't what people were directly using it's what the techies were
> thinking about when they designed their other stuff. (That and the Xerox
> Parc work...)
>
> Let's see, the real earthquakes in the computing world (off the top of my
> head) are:

1937 claude shannon A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits,"

1948 claude shannon A mathematical theory of information.

without those you're kind in trouble on the computing front...

> MIT: project whirlwind (which got computing off of vacuum tubes, spawned DEC,
> and Minsky's hacker lab. Gurus too numerous to mention.)
>
> Bell Labs: (the transistor, and 20 years later Unix. Gurus ken thompson,
> dennis ritchie, the three transistor guys, ).
>
> DARPA: (Arpanet (BBN), funded project MAC at MIT, and Multics which brought
> the MIT stuff to bell labs.)
>
> Xerox Parc (WIMP interface, WYSIWYG word processing/printing/desktop
> publishing, object oriented programming,
>
> The integrated circuit/microchip (Texas Instruments' manufacturing
> innovation, which led to the Intel 4004, which eventually led to the Altair,
> which led to the personal computer. Moore's Law would probably be the theme
> here...)
>
> The whole free software thing (Berkeley in the 70's to early 80's, Stallman
> and the FSF taking over from there. And Andrew Tanenbaum's Minix, which
> spawned Linux...)
>
> Huh, I'd have to mention IBM (forget the PC, how about the winchester
> drive?), and of course the AT&T breakup (a negative earthquake, but big
> anyway, sort of leading to the commercialization of the software side of
> things, although Gates was trying that already. AT&T just removed a lot of
> the roadblocks by shattering the opposition for a while.)
>
> Alright, I need to sit down and make an outline and a timeline. I admit
> this... (Collecting the data is the easy part. ORGANIZING this fermenting
> heap of disconnected facts and observations is the hard part...)
>
> > mrc
>
> Rob
>
> -
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Joel Jaeggli joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Academic User Services consult@gladstone.uoregon.edu
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It is clear that the arm of criticism cannot replace the criticism of
arms. Karl Marx -- Introduction to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
the right, 1843.