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> Bonus irony ... were developed ... on ... machines. Bill Gates and Paul Allen originally wrote Altair BASIC using an Intel 8080 emulator running on a PDP-10

• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "To develop something ground braking, that is clearly ahead of its time (competition) it helps a lot if you have access to better computer resources than others." Maybe. The reason C and UNIX existed was because they didn't have enough resources to use clearly better languages or OS design. Richards invented the "programmer is in control" philosophy because his crappy ESDAC couldn't run an ALGOL. Chopped off what couldn't fit until he got BCPL. Thompson and Ritchie modified that into C language to work with a PDP-7 and PDP-11. Likewise, after working on MULTICS, Thompson chopped off [good] features of MULTICS trying to fit UNICS, err UNIX, into those same machines. Originally implemented in assembly language since early versions of C were too primitive to get the job done. Final version of C was way less sophisticated than competition doing things like ALGOL or Pascal. Market demand, accessibility, and social effects that cause spreading seem to combine to increase odds of success more than what hardware is available.