6 Jun
2009
6 Jun
'09
12:29 a.m.
Ian King scripsit:
Not a very *good* article, either, IMHO. One gets the
impression the
author of the piece was given two or three pieces of data and
instructed to write a historical drama around them.
A bit more than that: the author credits Salus as his main source,
so if you want more detail, you know where to get it. Remember the
target audience.
I also suspect he's never seen a PDP-7, either.
Few of us have, and even fewer have seen one running Unix, I dare say.
For that matter, I never saw a PDP-11 running Unix, though I certainly
heard plenty about it: my first Unix-in-anger was MS Xenix System III on
a PC/AT with a 10 Mb hard drive.
It was unnecessary to slam the PDP-7 to make
the point that Unix was created on a computer of modest resources.
"Wimpy" is a disrespectful word, undoubtedly.
In other words, this read like any other popularized
account - which
would be expected, if it had been published in Ladies Home Journal.
Is it actually necessary to slam _Ladies' Home Journal_ to make the point
that _Computerworld_ is a popularizing magazine? Have you ever read even
a single issue of LHJ? I have read many of them, though admittedly not
since the 1970s.
--
John Cowan cowan(a)ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan
The present impossibility of giving a scientific explanation is no proof
that there is no scientific explanation. The unexplained is not to be
identified with the unexplainable, and the strange and extraordinary
nature of a fact is not a justification for attributing it to powers
above nature. --The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "telepathy" (1913)