The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

On 6 Dec 2011 at 9:52, Al Kossow wrote: To be fair, you have to understand the times and the culture. In 1973, the dominant storage technology was still core. Backplanes were still done with twisted pair and taper pins. The Cyber 70 line was mostly a cosmetic rework of the old 60s 6000/7000 series. The 170 series migrated to ECL ICs instead of discrete transistors and semiconductor memory. Compared to everything that had gone before, it was major, even if the same old architecture (6 bit characters, ones' completement) and instruction set was being implemented. The dual-personality Cyber 180 ws a major rework of the basic architecture, even if most CDC customers operated the systems in 60 bit mode to be compatible with the old hardware. While the 6000/7000/Cyber 70/170 systems had a very clean simple RISC design, the 180 ws anything but--sort of the response to the sucker question "What instructions would you want for product xxx?". For the system programmers, little nits such as the move to twos complement, hexadecimal notation and reversing the order of the bit numbering in a word were just icing. The times were another factor. Seymour Cray's going off and doing his thing hurt CDC's high-end sales badly. CDC's fortunes rapidly declined and the 70s and 80s were marked by layoffs--one co-worker committed suicide when he realized that having spent his career with CDC, job prospects were limited at his age. The NIH mentality of units within CDC hurt a lot. When one of the Cyber 180 software architects gave a presentation of the 180's operating system software sometime around 1976, I was furious when the subject came to paging software. He described in some detail what he thought the paging should be--simple demand paging. I raised my hand and asked him if he'd discussed the matter any with members of CDC's other 64-bit virtual-memory machines already in production. He looked at me as if I'd just informed him that he had an unknown twin brother. I told him that STAR had been working with the technology since 1969 and that demand-paging was going to give him grief. I suggested that he talk to our pager guy about working-set paging. I don't think he ever did. And finally, a lot of the talent had flown the coop. Seymour was gone and had taken a bunch of key talent with him. Jim Thornton was consulting and playing with a loop of coax that ran around the parking lots at Arden Hills. And a lot of other talent had left to join the early microcomputer scene in California. It was surprising that CDC lasted as long as it did. BTW, in 1984, I strongly suggested to Neil Lincoln that ETA adopt Unix as the OS for the ETA-10. To his credit, he agreed with me, but failed to convince others. Eventually, ETA did have a Unix port done by an outside firm, but by then, it was too late for them. --Chuck