3 ms·
Honestly, it actually DOES make sense to use separate characters for directory-delineation versus option switches. There was no way of knowing in 1982 that UNI
by StevePerkins 7y ago
Honestly, it actually DOES make sense to use separate characters for directory-delineation versus option switches.
There was no way of knowing in 1982 that UNIX was going to take over the world. That everything from corporate mainframes, to desktop PC's, and even phones would rally around the conventions of this largely academic OS.
- enneff 7y agoUnix wasn’t academic. It was pragmatic from the start. A first-hand account: https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o
- kazinator 7y agoAlso, Bell Labs wasn't a university, and Thompson and Ritchie were not tenured lecturers. They wrote assembly code, not papers.
- kragen 7y agoThey wrote papers too (Bell Labs was, after all, a research lab), took sabbaticals, and lectured at universities. I think one of the group (Kernighan?) took a sabbatical at Berkeley that was one of the events that gave rise to BSD?
- pjmlp 7y agoUNIX was academic, because Bell Labs were forbidden to make profit out of it and thus licensed it via a symbolic price to universities alongside source code tapes. Had Bell Labs been allowed to sell it, and history would have turned a very different path concerning UNIX clones and its adoption.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]