3 ms·
Wasn't Unix proprietary and very expensive at the time ?
by poulpy123 4y ago
Wasn't Unix proprietary and very expensive at the time ?
- pjmlp 4y agoNo, AT&T was forbidden by law to take advantage of Bell Labs work commercially, hence why UNIX spread into universities, the famous lions book came to be[0], and tapes with source code where shared with a license cost that was symbolic versus the 1970's mainsframe OSes. When this situation changed during the mid-80's, AT&T was rather quick to sue Berkley university regarding BSD, forbid the further publishing of the lions book (which kept being widespread via black market copies), however by the time these events took place the influence of UNIX and C across the industry was already quite visible. [0] - https://warsus.github.io/lions-/ https://warsus.github.io/lions-/
- kjs3 4y agoAll of that is true (still have my n-th generation Lions photocopy someplace), but Modula-2 was early '80s (1982?). By that timeframe you had lots of folks shipping commercial Version 7 or System III variants (e.g. Unisoft, ISC, Microsoft (Xenix), Venix, Amdahl, Sun), with System V based systems just around the corner. These generally were, as the OP said, "proprietary and very expensive". I recall we still got a sweetheart deal on university licensing from AT&T (usually obtained only because it was required to get a 4BSD distribution tape from UCB...we won't discuss the 3B20s), but commercial shops were charged real cash. Or did I miss your point?
- pjmlp 4y agoModula-2 was 1978 actually, and those systems were still a couple of years away as you mention. And even when they came to be, the real money they were charging (while licensing for peanuts the original source code) was still quite cheap versus paying for what the competition was asking for, hence why long term UNIX wiped out most of them, with IBM and Unisys mainframes/micros being the last standing survivors.