On Jul 8, 2009, at 6:39 AM, Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>> K+R were in a research setting where they didn't have to care about  =

>> profit or competitive advantage.  They had nothing to loose by  =

>> letting everyone at it,
>
> They were in a commercial venue, porting Unix from PDP-7 to PDP-11.  =

> This is the reason why they created C, as a sort of a portable  =

> assembler. (This wasn't a research project, it was commercial --  =

> they wanted to sell the PDP-11 :)

K&R were at Bell Labs, weren't they?   While Bell Labs wasn't quite so  =

bad as (say) Xerox PARC, they were pretty far away from being  =

"commercial", especially in those days!  (Look at how long it took  =

before Unix became a commercial offering.)

And "AT&T wanted to sell [DEC] PDP11s"??  Huh??


> Wirth created Pascal at the ETH in Z=FCrich; not more commercial than  =

> AT&T, it seems, perhaps less :)

Ah, you know those university profs.  Their "product" is publication  =

("publish or perish"); especially nice because commercial viability is  =

less of an issue...  :-)

BillW


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