The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

and here is a message I posted to the TUHS mailing list when he was starting to work on the article. I think this would have been a more interesting direction to take than just rehashing the history of Unix. -- On 6/27/11 5:11 PM, Warren Toomey wrote: The notion that Unix provided a good enough set of system services that people got on with building systems with a common set of tools. This included things like the RATFOR-based portable operating systems that came out of Georgia Tech and Laurence Livermore Labs. It took most of the 70's to get going, but by the 80's microprocessors were powerful enough that Unix would run well on them, and that dovetailed with Stallman's efforts to get a freely available tool chain. Contrast this with VMS/WinNT and the dozens of proprietary systems which survived by vendor lock in. Having lived through the OS wars inside Apple, it became clear that there weren't enough developer resources available to build a new system from scratch, and the value added wasn't in the core OS and tools, but the user environment. This appears to have occurred to almost everyone else now as well. Go for product differentiators and leverage as much freely available system infrastructure as you can. I was just digging through some CDC documents we just received concerning the joint CDC/NCR developments that happened in the early 70's, and was thinking how fast the pace of system change is now. The system they started on in 1973 was ultimately released almost 10 years later as the CYBER 180. By the end of the 80's they were thinking of porting Unix to it. I can't imagine anyone taking 10 years today to develop a new computer system, or thinking of writing an operating system and tool chain from scratch. Building on the 40 years of experience and not reinventing wheels is the ultimate legacy of the Unix system.