[NTLUG:Discuss] Killing Off Linux: It's All Academic

[Steve Baker]

Rusty Haddock wrote:
> 
> Steve Baker wrote:
>     >
>     >Those who are upset about this M$ tactic should recollect that
>     >AT&T used this exact tactic (giving away the OS for free to
>     >colleges) to promote UNIX.  Without *that* tactic, we might
>     >have a Linux that was a clone of - erm VM/CMS or VMS <shudder>
> 
> I'm sure many of the people on this list could hardly recollect back
> then -- before they were either born or cognizant of the world.  :-)

Oh.  :-(

I learned to program in C on a PDP-11/70 running UNIX v6 in 1976.
Using 'ed' on a DecWriter was not great - but a lot better than
the 029 card-punch machines that were the alternative on our
college mainframe.

I'm told that you could print out the entire UNIX v6 OS with all its
tools - and still have change from a box of printer paper!  At 66 lines
per page and 1000 sheets to a box that means it all fit in 66,000 lines
of code.  I find that hard to believe.

> AT&T did no such thing to "promote" Unix by giving it away to educational
> institutions!  AT&T (before the Death Star) nor their Bell Laboratories
> really did anything to promote Unix and AT&T wasn't all that keen about
> being in the software business either (which wasn't much of a industry
> back then, circa 1976-79).  True, AT&T basically "gave away" Version 6
> Unix to universities but purely on a education discount which was "pay for
> the tape and a small handling fee".

Well, whether they *intended* this to be a promotion or not is hard to
say - but there is no doubt in my mind that it had that exact effect.

Everyone I knew who worked on that PDP box went on to pressurize the
companies they eventually worked for into running UNIX.

> Unix at that time was still *VERY*
> experimental and very "researchy" (in the OpSys field) even in the Labs
> yet it, like Linux of a few years ago, was getting a lot of work done for
> people.  It wasn't until the latter days of Version 7 and after that
> (System III, etc) when AT&T realized they had a product to sell and people
> were BEGGING for it.  It was Version 7 that the folks at Berzerkley took
> and added virtual memory to and ported it to those "nifty" new VAX-11/780's
> that Digital was introducing and selling like "virtual" [ouch] hotcakes.

Yep - the Version 6 UNIX was still pretty nifty though.  All the things
that made UNIX what it is today were basically there. 

I'm a little suprised when you say that V6 didn't have virtual memory.
That old PDP-11 only had 64K words of memory - 128Kbytes.  We often
had several people logged into it at once - it's hard to believe that
without virtual memory.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)