New subject: PDP-11 questions

25 Jan 2016

...
  From: Norman Wilson 
...
  I have to disagree in part 
You make a number of good points. A few comments:

...
  the PDP-11 is a big part of what made UNIX so
widespread, especially in
 university departments 
That last part was really a big factor, one not to be understated.  That
penetration led to production of a whole generation of people who i) were
familiar with Unix, and ii) liked it, and were not about to put up with the
OS's being turned out by various vendors.

...
  I too suspect that a majority (though I'm not so
sure about `vast') of
 PDP-11s never ran UNIX. 
'Embedded systems'. The number of PDP-11's running timesharing was a small
share of the total number, I expect.

...
  I don't think those who weren't around in
the latter 1970s and early
 1980s can appreciate the ways in which UNIX captured many programmers
 ... as no other competing system could. 
Very true. My jaw basically hit the floor when I first saw (ca. '75) what Unix
was like. People who didn't live through that transition can't _really_ grok
it, any more than my kids can really fully grok a world without mobile
phones. It wasn't as powerful as Multics, but I was completely blown away that
anyone could get that much capability into a PDP-11 OS.

     Noel

Re: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions