Re: [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

Clem Cole asks: I never talked to Jay about his motivation for working on pcc for TOPS-20. I visited Ken Harrenstien at SRI, but regrettably, only once. I have great admiration for his work on kcc, and later, his PDP-10 emulator (written in C, of course). I suspect that the main reason was that in the early 1980s, we could still see years of use of our PDP-10 systems in Computer Science and the College of Science, yet, being Node 4 of the original 5 nodes of the Arpanet, we were in frequent contact with Berkeley people who were active in the BSD effort. Besides our PDP-10s, we had several PDP-11s and VAXes that could run Unix, so we wanted our software to run on all of those systems, and C would be the obvious common programming language. Also, the PC revolution that started in roughly 1980 made it clear that computers were going to get a lot cheaper, and a lot more numerous, so in academia, we would phase out our Big Iron machines and replace them with Unix workstations. To help our users begin to make the transition to Unix, I wrote this Rosetta Stone document: Unix for TOPS-20 Users [24-June-1987] http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/publications/1987/t20unix.pdf I've not looked at it in years, and I might now cringe at parts, but most of our users in the College of Science were not computer geeks, but just scientists and mathematicians trying to do their research and teaching, so they needed help. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------