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