Anyone remember FCC Regs on emissions was Tops10 disk quota quandary 1337

On Sun, 6 Mar 2005, John Sauter

Reasonable people can agree to disagree.

That certainly does not mesh with what's written in the Tenex Memos, nor what I was told by numerous people at MIT who were around at the time. The upshot was that neither the DEC monitor nor the DEC buttembler (Tenex was originally written in FAIL) "met our needs."

JMC (or perhaps it was LES) once told me that he forbade a homebrew operating system, and was rather irritated that the hackers made one anyway and gave up any attempt at merging after 3.54.

I'm quite aware of it. I'm all too familiar with DEC operating systems which required you to run PIP (or whatever) manually.

I do too. Nevertheless, it wasn't particularly structured or designed to be extensible, and...

That includes the majority of the people who did TOPS-10 development after the mid-1970s. So now Barb is going to be mad at you... :-)

Yes, that can happen too. However, in Tony's case, he tried to use the RH20 in the familiar DF10 way, and the RH20 bit back. Tony buttumed that the RH20 was a programmer-friendly device of the 1960s. It was not.

Unfortunately, this is how devices have been designed for the past few decades. The convenience of the programmer who writes the device driver is no longer a design criterion.

That doesn't explain the people who jumped ship to TOPS-20 long before 1978, at a time when DEC's line was still "TOPS-20 is the baby system then you grow up to TOPS-10".

That doesn't explain the people who earlier jumped ship to Tenex.

That doesn't explain the people who jumped ship from VMS to UNIX in 1980, long before ULTRIX.

That doesn't explain the people today who jump ship from Windows to Linux or BSD or Mac OS X.

That doesn't explain the people dumping IE for Firefox.

All of these people very definitely made a choice outside what currently seems to be the mainstream, went to considerable extra trouble for it, and did so long before there was any writing on the wall.

-- Mark --

Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.