Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: att & osf
Message-ID: <1988Aug16.214307.20597@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <4964@killer.DALLAS.TX.US> <3395@vpk4.UUCP> <1988Aug8.174232.112@utzoo.uucp> <2857@ttrdc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 88 21:43:07 GMT

In article <2857@ttrdc.UUCP> levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
>...  The UNIX operating system (and its structure
>and philosophy... came to exist because of AT&T.

No, actually, they came to exist because of the Bell System.  Any resemblance
to today's AT&T is accidental.  :-)

>... How you could legitimately turn MacQuarrie's quote above
>into a "claim that [AT&T is] bending over backwards to..."

Actually, fairly easily.  He claimed that they had worked extremely hard
to provide a hardware-independent operating system.  I pointed out that
they had worked hard to provide a system which ran on all the hardware
*they* were interested in using or selling.  There is a difference!

Even there, one should note that the original work to make the system
portable was largely done by the Bell Labs research people; AT&T has
since basically done diddly-squat about improving portability, since the
remaining portability problems didn't affect *them*.  (They've done a
little bit of work on portability, but they've also introduced some new
and gratuitous portability problems of their own, so the overall balance
is roughly zero.)
-- 
Intel CPUs are not defective,  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
they just act that way.        | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu