15 May
2018
15 May
'18
5:14 p.m.
On 5/15/2018 7:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
So what's the back story with PWB? It seems like
sort of a back water
but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff. I feel like there
was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose. So far
as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
originals.
We used PWB at Ford Aerospace in the late 70s. It might have been
the closest to a commercial Unix version there was back then. John
Mashey had a lot to do with PWB so maybe he can say a few words about
it if he's on here.
It's ironic - back in the late 70s there were almost as many
variations of Unix as there are Linux distributions now. It made the
commercial software vendors crazy because each required separate
development and QA resources, and none of them had enough traction
to be the only version that a vendor would support (like maybe
RedHat now).
Jon Forrest