Two Stop Bits | Real alternative history territory here, but one path possible path is that it s...

KODust 2 days ago | parent

Real alternative history territory here, but one path possible path is that it still have been attractive enough to port to the VAX, and we'd have ended up in roughly same place. Lots of handwaving and assumptions, of course.

I'm not sure Unix failing to take off would have been bad. It would certainly be a different world.

larsbrinkhoff 1 day ago
Some random thoughts. Writing a timesharing system for a computer with a 16-bit address space forced the Unix philosophy with many small single-purpose programs passing data between them. A timesharing system on a PDP-10 wouldn't have this constraint, and may well not have developed the Unix philosophy. Maybe that would have removed some of the appeal of "Unix-10".
Second, the VAX grew from the PDP-11 as a 32-bit addressing extension. So porting from the PDP-11 to the VAX is rather natural and easy. In contrast, the PDP-10 is rather different from both the PDP-11 and VAX. Programs written in assembly language will not port over. If Bell labs would have developed a C language for the PDP-10, I wager it would have looked different and not have become popular in an 8-bit byte world.
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- bmonkey325 1 day ago
  Some forget that Unix started out on the pdp-7 which was 18-bit words so in some ways the architecture argument doesn’t really hold up. I think it’s more what machine were they could access.
  https://linfo.org/pdp-7.html#:~:text=The%20PDP-7%20was%20a%2....
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  - larsbrinkhoff 20 hours ago
    PDP-7 Unix is even more cramped with a 12-bit address space per process.
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    - bmonkey325 16 hours ago
      This version of Unix was all assembly code and not portable. Once they could move to a better machine I think they realized they didn’t want to write it again in assembly because porting could be difficult.
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      - larsbrinkhoff 14 hours ago
        My argument is that the PDP-7 and PDP-11 possibly forced the Unix philosophy. I don't understand what you are arguing.
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  - KODust 1 day ago
    Yes, this is the thing -- it's clear that Ken Thompson valued simplicity, one reason being that he and a couple of other people could maintain the entire thing without a large support organization. Whether that would have survived the PDP-10, I'm not sure. But I suspect it would have have been recognizably Unix.
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bmonkey325 2 days ago
Is this the parallel universe where Mac won and Windows faded into obscurity. Amiga took over gaming and PlayStation and XBox never happened ? .
Also. Steve Jobs lives…..
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- KODust 1 day ago
  Dave Cutler stayed at DEC, shipped popular workstations built with PRISM chips, Microsoft and IBM kissed and made up and we're all using Windows derived from OS/2 w/Presentation Manager today.
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  - bmonkey325 1 day ago
    Put that way. In the hear and now, I realize we are in the darkest timeline.
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