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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!sdd.hp.com!mips!cs.uoregon.edu!majestix.cs.uoregon.edu!mike From: mike@majestix.cs.uoregon.edu (Michael John Haertel) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,alt.suit.att-bsdi Subject: Re: UNIGRAM's article on the USL-BSDI suit Message-ID: <1992Aug6.193353.28047@cs.uoregon.edu> Date: 6 Aug 92 19:33:53 GMT References: <o772klk@twilight.wpd.sgi.com> <1992Aug06.010408.2470@kithrup.COM> <1992Aug6.170508.14978@gateway.novell.com> Sender: news@cs.uoregon.edu (Netnews Owner) Organization: University of Oregon Computer and Information Sciences Dept. Lines: 17 In article <1992Aug6.170508.14978@gateway.novell.com> terry@npd.Novell.COM (Terry Lambert) writes: > Well, at least it was intended as a loader for several Multics games >on the PDP. This is the anecdotal reason for it's initial developement. Not true. According to Ritchie's 1984 paper, Unix originally came about because there was a Multics spacewar game that cost too much CPU time to run. Thompson found an unused PDP-7 and set about *re-implementing* the spacewar game for it. In the process, he wrote an assembler, linker, floating point libraries, and a variety of other stuff. From there it wasn't far to a file system, and based on that they managed to persuade management to get them a PDP-11, and the rest is history. But Unix was never a "loader for Multics games". The PDP-7 wasn't even the same architecture as the GE-635. Incidentally, I suspect Pike's work on window systems was largely motivated by a desire to play asteroids. :-)