Re: [tlug] Unix's 40th Birthday

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > It just happened to be the free OS and set of tools that became
 > predominant. I posit that it could just as easily have been
 > FreeVMS, had a decent clone of that gained enough momentum in the
 > early '90s.

I'm not so sure.  I never actually wrote code for VMS, but a lot of my
classmates did, and both TOPS-20 and Unix were far more pleasant
environments than VMS in the mid-80s (I don't know about 90s vintage
VMS).  The whole small, single-purpose filter idea was so convenient
for many tasks.  At least in my class in grad school, though, people
who needed new reports from the stats or sim programs would alter the
main program, invariably introducing bugs in the process, which had to
be debugged before work could continue.  Two years later as a freshly
minted faculty member, I and my colleagues were already writing Unix
programs that would spew everything they knew to stdout, and filter
that with grep or awk.  (By now I've forgotten everything I know about
awk except that it comes from the authors' names.  Oh yeah, I actually
remember the names, too: Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. :-)