Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped - TUHS

19 Jun 2014

They pitched a PDP-10 for a similar reason--hardware to build a
bigger Unix on. When a small pot of end-of-year money appeared,
they took a PDP-11 instead--serendipitously, because university
folks started proving this elegant system on cheap hardware
in many projects in small labs, which they never could have
done had the system existed on a PDP-10 mainframe. While
upper management did not directly cause Unix to be built,
their decisions to abandon Multics and not to buy a PDP-10
were notable causes for its creation and spread.

Doug

...
  Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:43:51 -0700
 From: iking(a)killthewabbit.org
 To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org,Doug McIlroy &lt;doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu&gt;
 Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped
 Message-ID: <ef723f8a-52b6-4810-be59-1837c75b1da3.maildroid@localhost>
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

 Interesting - what's your source?  It was also my understanding they used the -7
'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a PDP-10, which had
TOPS-10.  - Ian

 Sent from my android device.

 -----Original Message-----
 From: Doug McIlroy &lt;doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu&gt;
 To: tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org
 Sent: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 4:06 AM
 Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

  It's always been a bit of a mystery to me
why Thompson and Ritchie decided they needed to write a new executive - UNICS - rather
than use DECsys.  
 It was the other way around. They had conceived a clean, simple, yet
 powerful, operating system and needed a machine to build it on. A
 cast-off PDP-7 happened to be at hand.

 Doug 