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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (28539)	3/4/2000 9:25:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

JC - you're right that I have not yet read the Unix book - I'll put that on my list of things to do today. But I'm not sure what you mean by "how silly that VAX VMS rhetoric is"... perhaps you don't remember the state of the computing world back in 1970, but every serious computer jock knew the OS code by heart for every machine he worked on, and hacking the OS, or writing your own, was pretty routine. Prior to the mid-60s, computer professionals were a small "priesthood" tied closely to the computer vendors. Digital Equipment opened the door to a much larger pool of people when they introduced low-cost computers in the late 60s and early 70s. It was possible to buy a "real" computer for less than $20K as opposed to the $100Ks and big infrastructures required previously, and so small businesses and university departments could just go out and buy one and plug it in. Richie did the original work on "UNICS" (UNiplexed Information and Computing System) on a digital platform - I think a PDP-7 or PDP-8 - starting before 1970, and pretty much all of the early Unix development was on Digital platforms. PDP-8s and PDP-11s were widely available in universities and many IT shops in the early 70s but there was no Unix available outside of AT&T prior to 1975. I had heard a little about Unix at that time but first got a look at it in 1976 when I helped develop an environment for teaching operating systems development. The base for that was a PDP-11/70 running RSTS but students could develop and download components to run Unix on a PDP-8 using cross-compilers. Both the AT&T and BSD Unix flavors were available in 1977 but it was an academic exercise at that time... a bunch of lego blocks that people were fooling with. In the late 70s I saw versions targeted at VAX as well. Although most of the concepts and utilities were what we know today, including key concepts like named pipes, what you had at the end of that process was about as close to a real OS as a lego car is to a real car... it was another 5 years (another "blink of the eye" <gg>) before versions that could be used by mere mortals were available. The VMS systems in that same period supported clustering, distributed storage and lock management, and a list of other features too long to catalog here. If Ken Olsen had not been so interested in preserving his control of the VAX/VMS architecture, Digital could easily have been the platform of choice for Unix, since DEC products were the primary Unix platforms for the first 10 years of Unix development. But of course, Ken made the same mistake that many others have made - he saw Unix not as an opportunity but as a threat. Still, the DEC platforms were "the place to be" for computer jocks in the 70s and early 80s, whether they were of the Unix persuasion or not. I would be interested in why you think VAX VMS rhetoric is "silly"...