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. ====== I think Doug's source is in the class `personal observation.' He was there at the time; Ken and Dennis's department head, if I've got it right. Remember that Bell Labs had just disengaged itself from the Multics project. The interest in a new OS sprang partly from the desire to have a comfortable multi-user system now that Multics was no longer available. That's why the DEC operating systems of the time, which were (as I understand it) simple single-user monitors, didn't fill the bill. The character of the players matters too: remember that Ken is the guy who one night sat down to write a Fortran compiler because real systems have Fortran, and ended up inventing B instead. I've read that there was indeed a pitch to buy a PDP-10; that there was some complicated plan to lower the effective cost; and that upper management (not Doug) turned it down because `Bell Labs doesn't do business that way.' I think I got that from Dennis's retrospective paper, published in the 1984 all-UNIX issue of the Bell Labs Techical Journal, a must-read (along with the late-1970s all-UNIX issue of BSTJ) for anyone on this list. _______________________________________________ TUHS mailing list TUHS(a)minnie.tuhs.org https://minnie.tuhs.org/mailman/listinfo/tuhs