I've been meaning to ask about this for a while....

"... The reason why is because there was tremendous antagonism between New York and L.A. L.A. was, you know, full of color, full of acid, full of hippies, and we were not like that.

We dressed in black and white. We did not like free love. ..... We took amphetamine; they took LSD. They were, you know, sort of loving and happy, and we were - we weren't really evil, we were more intellectual, more about art."

[Mary Woronov, in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross on "Fresh Air", talking about New York City, Warhol's Factory and shows in Los Angeles while touring with the Velvet Underground: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=241437872]

Note: I am not suggesting that anyone involved with Unix ever took amphetamines, nor, despite the usual crack about LSD and BSD, that anyone on the west coast was taking acid, though Markov's "What the Dormouse Said" would indicate that many of you WERE tripping.

It seems like Unix is largely a child of the coasts. Notable work in Utah, Colorado and Chicago aside, it seems the bulk of early Unix work happened in either the greater New York metro area in northern New Jersey or the greater Bay area around San Francisco. Notable work was also done in Massachusetts, but again, that's a coastal state and I think it's fair to say that most of that was inside the route 128 corridor. Of course work was done internationally, but I'm particularly curious about differences in US culture here, and how they influenced things.

The question is, to what extent did differences in coastal cultures influence things like design aesthetics? I think it's is accurate to characterize early BTL Unix by it's minimalism, and others have echoed this (cf. Richard Gabriel in the "Worse is Better" papers). But similarly, BSD has always felt like a larger system -- didn't Lions go as far as to quip about the succinctness of 6th Edition being "fixed" by 4BSD?

Anyway, I believe it is fair to say that early Unix has a rather distinct feel from later BSD-derived systems and the two did evolve in different geographic locations. Furthermore, the world was not as connected then as it is now.

So to what extent, if any, was this a function of the larger cultural forces at play near where that work was taking place?

- Dan C.