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> By porting Unix to the PDP-11 in 1970, the group ensured Unix would live on into the future. I have a question about that. Why would they do this? What was

> By porting Unix to the PDP-11 in 1970, the group ensured Unix would live on into the future. I have a question about that. Why would they do this? What was so valuable in these few lines of (mostly proprietary) code, that you would make the effort to port instead of just writing from scratch on the new machine? If you take a look at what came later, a lot of much more substantial software packages were made by a single bedroom coder in his spare time. Why port? It couldn't be to save effort? (At least the conceptual level of things would remain the same if you start from scratch.)

Merrill 7y ago
About 1970 the first minicomputers were being applied to operations, administration and maintenance functions in the Bell System. The PDP-7 was too expensive and the PDP-8 was too limited to compete favorably with others. The PDP-11 was applied widely and if the Unix OS was to be used by the development groups instead of the DEC operating systems, it had to be ported.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  The port wasn't motivated by the development groups. It was sold to management as a word processing / typesetting system. I vividly remember my first encounter with Unix, in an ACM journal archive at the local university library as a teenager in the late '70s, utterly astonished to find lower-case computer commands and prompts.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    True, the development groups weren't too keen on Unix. They wanted to choose the minicomputer and operating system from those commercially available and get on with developing applications without the risks and effort of using an unproven operating system. But Research always wanted to demonstrate that they were contributing to the company, so eventually Unix had to be adopted. Use by development groups for Western Electric products was different from the in-house Unix systems run by the Bell Labs data center that were used as time shared systems for email, general computing, and document production using nroff and memo macros. Moving away from all upper case made line printers less efficient, but about that time laser phototypesetting became available.
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      The main thing at the time was that mixed-case Teletypes were becoming common.
bsdimp 7y ago
They ported because there was a user base that liked the commends and environment and wanted to keep using it. It was a rewrite from scratch to the same design spec.
jeremyjh 7y ago
Their goal was to develop a cross-platform OS - so porting was kind of the whole point. Making code and systems portable between architectures was a research topic they wanted to prove out and learn from.
rst 7y ago
The first PDP-11 Unix was written in assembly, and was thus a from-scratch rewrite of PDP-7 Unix (also in assembly, for a very different machine). The rewrite into an early version of C came later, done initially for the same reasons you'd prefer C to assembly in, say embedded systems (maintainability) -- and the idea of using the C code as the basis for a port came a few years after that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix

Merrill 7y ago

About 1970 the first minicomputers were being applied to operations, administration and maintenance functions in the Bell System. The PDP-7 was too expensive and the PDP-8 was too limited to compete favorably with others. The PDP-11 was applied widely and if the Unix OS was to be used by the development groups instead of the DEC operating systems, it had to be ported.

ncmncm 7y ago
The port wasn't motivated by the development groups. It was sold to management as a word processing / typesetting system. I vividly remember my first encounter with Unix, in an ACM journal archive at the local university library as a teenager in the late '70s, utterly astonished to find lower-case computer commands and prompts.
- Merrill 7y ago
  True, the development groups weren't too keen on Unix. They wanted to choose the minicomputer and operating system from those commercially available and get on with developing applications without the risks and effort of using an unproven operating system. But Research always wanted to demonstrate that they were contributing to the company, so eventually Unix had to be adopted. Use by development groups for Western Electric products was different from the in-house Unix systems run by the Bell Labs data center that were used as time shared systems for email, general computing, and document production using nroff and memo macros. Moving away from all upper case made line printers less efficient, but about that time laser phototypesetting became available.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    The main thing at the time was that mixed-case Teletypes were becoming common.

bsdimp 7y ago

They ported because there was a user base that liked the commends and environment and wanted to keep using it. It was a rewrite from scratch to the same design spec.

jeremyjh 7y ago

Their goal was to develop a cross-platform OS - so porting was kind of the whole point. Making code and systems portable between architectures was a research topic they wanted to prove out and learn from.

rst 7y ago

The first PDP-11 Unix was written in assembly, and was thus a from-scratch rewrite of PDP-7 Unix (also in assembly, for a very different machine). The rewrite into an early version of C came later, done initially for the same reasons you'd prefer C to assembly in, say embedded systems (maintainability) -- and the idea of using the C code as the basis for a port came a few years after that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix