[SunRescue] Re: Multics

[Ken Hansen]

Not quite...

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie did not code Unix "over a weekend" to "play
video games."

You appear to have taken several true stories and made them into one, not
real story.

The first video game was at MIT, Space Wars, IIRC, ran on a PDP-<very low
number>.

Unix evolved over a long period, starting with a design coded on a PDP-<very
low number> that was sitting idle at Bell Labs. They eventually got funding
to twist Unix into a useful office automation package for the Patent Office
at Bell Labs...

Ken
(Damn, I can't find the nice brief history of Unix at the AT&T web site...
link is on another machine...)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joshua D. Boyd" <jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu>
To: <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 7:14 PM
Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Re: Multics


> On Tue, 22 May 2001, Brian Dunbar wrote:
<snip>
> Well, unix sprung up because Multics was too hard and complex to
> implement.  The Multics project was years late, and on the ropes, when a
> pair of programmers hacked out unix over a weekend to play video games on
> an old PDP.

<snip>