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From: nowakp@hfsi.hfsi.com (Paul Nowak)
Subject: Re: Retro-Computing!
Message-ID: <1995Apr19.194502.19511@hfsi.hfsi.com>
Organization: HFSI
References: <D5yxwn.5BG@sdf.saomai.org> <Pine.NXT.3.92.950330155824.2916A-100000@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU> <D6o173.8p3@lincoln.gpsemi.com> <Pine.NXT.3.92.950407155823.5627A-100000@tomobiki-cho.cac.washington.edu> <D6q3A5.Ht9@bonkers.taronga.com> <3mcs53$sjv@nntp2.u.washington.edu>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 1995 19:45:02 GMT
Lines: 43

kkt@u.washington.edu (Patrick Scheible) writes:

>peter@bonkers.taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

>>In article <Pine.NXT.3.92.950407155823.5627A-100000@tomobiki-cho.cac.washington.edu>,
>>Mark Crispin  <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU> wrote:
>>>For many years, UNIX was held up as the "wave of the future", the slayer
>>>of "old dinosaur" operating systems such as TOPS-20.  Yet TOPS-20 had
>>>levels of friendliness and power that are unequaled to this day.

>>Yeh, and it required systems far more powerful than UNIX, which is the real
>>reason we're using UNIX today rather than TOPS-20 or Multics. TOPS was just
>>not economical at the time (I remember when they got rid of the TOPS system
>>at Berkeley for APL work and replaced it with an IBM running VM/CMS. Bleh).

>> (remainder deleted)

>I thought it had more to do with the combination of being written in a
>portable language, and being licensed at reasonable fees?

In a very smart marketing move in the seventies, deck went after the second
tier of colleges and universities, rightly figuring that their graduates would
be the mid-level decision makers of the future (This is a guess, I don't know it
for a fact but it was the best reasoning I could come up with back then.) and
they would learn computer science on DEC systems (the second tier was just
getting their CS departments into swing to produce "DP Professionals" [ACH!OOP!]
and thus favor DEC in future buying decisions. They also suggested that the
schools would be able to get UNIX from Bell Labs for free [I think it's because
the DEC OSs of the time bore more than a passing resemblance to a Hoover [the
vacuum cleaner for the young among you]. The allegiance went to UNIX instead of
to DEC. Either way it was a mistake.-=-Paul(N)


>But speaking of power, how does the size of TOPS-20 compare with a
>current Unix implementation?  (Not a troll, I'm really curious... to
>be fair, don't include X-windows in the Unix implementation.)

>-- Patrick
