William "Chops" Westfield 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.)

But didn't AT&T (owner of Bell Labs) sell Unix licenses? Not to the
general public, but still sell them?

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

Right... got that mixed up. They wanted to sell Unix for those PDP-11s
-- or not?


>> 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...  :-) =


Exactly. They don't have to worry about commercial success, so they
could do it right. Which they apparently didn't, in this case :)

Gerhard

-- =

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