17 Oct
2011
17 Oct
'11
4:16 p.m.
On 17/10/11 4:01 PM, Doc Shipley wrote:
The ongoing thread about the origins of C and UNIX
have made me wonder
about something I was told years ago:
"UNIX was written as a host platform for C *development* and was not
originally envisioned as the production platform for applications
developed on it."
In other words, the intent was that developers would write code on UNIX,
then port it to an "application-oriented" OS for production.
Is there any truth to that?
Early on, Unix was justified to the boss as a monetiseable
typesetting/documentation prep system, to which considerable effort was
devoted, and of course we deal with the legacy of that every time we use
'man'...
The late Dennis Ritchie gave the story in his well known paper on Unix
history. That paper should shed light on your question:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html
The papers in the BSTJ Unix edition, and the rich bundled toolset, make
it pretty clear (imho) that Unix was also meant to support program
development.
--Toby
Doc