3 ms·

UNIX was completely irrelevant/unreachable for most people until Linux showed up. By that time, C was already popular outside the UNIX world.

pjmlp 4y ago
Nope, it was what most companies and universities were using in their compute centers, when not using MS-DOS with Novell Netware.
nine_k 4y ago
I don't know about most of the people. What may have mattered was easy access to Unix for students in universities. You would normally expect there some VAXen, Sun hardware, and even PDPs, all running Unix. Had AT&T made Plan 9 available in equally relaxed terms, history might have gone differently, too.
flomo 4y ago
University site licenses for UNIX were very inexpensive. UNIX/C was way more accessible than most competitors, and students took that experience out to the real world.
tialaramex 4y ago
"Most people" don't matter here. The girl who bags your shopping doesn't need to know what UNIX® is for C to take over the world, but the guy who wrote Commander Keen (and who will go on to write Doom and Quake) does. For example in Spring 1991, with Linux still just some C code Linus Torvalds was thinking of naming Freax if he got it working, JANET, the organisation providing network access to the UK's universities (via X.25 of course) decides to launch JIPS, an experimental IP network. JIPS was huge. Why was JIPS huge? Because unlike X.25 you could just download BSD source spin up a Unix with TCP/IP and run everything you could think of or write your own software, you don't need anybody's permission - there's some guy at CERN who has written a "Web browser" which sounds pretty interesting for instance. By the time Torvalds writes his Linux 0.0.1 announcement email, JIPS is the dominant use of JANET and X.25 is on its way to deprecation. It was all bundled together with this free software I got, 100% legit. It seems to work pretty good, and unless you've got funding from somewhere to use something different I think we should use C / IP / Unix.

pjmlp 4y ago

Nope, it was what most companies and universities were using in their compute centers, when not using MS-DOS with Novell Netware.

nine_k 4y ago

I don't know about most of the people. What may have mattered was easy access to Unix for students in universities. You would normally expect there some VAXen, Sun hardware, and even PDPs, all running Unix. Had AT&T made Plan 9 available in equally relaxed terms, history might have gone differently, too.

flomo 4y ago

University site licenses for UNIX were very inexpensive. UNIX/C was way more accessible than most competitors, and students took that experience out to the real world.

tialaramex 4y ago

"Most people" don't matter here. The girl who bags your shopping doesn't need to know what UNIX® is for C to take over the world, but the guy who wrote Commander Keen (and who will go on to write Doom and Quake) does. For example in Spring 1991, with Linux still just some C code Linus Torvalds was thinking of naming Freax if he got it working, JANET, the organisation providing network access to the UK's universities (via X.25 of course) decides to launch JIPS, an experimental IP network. JIPS was huge. Why was JIPS huge? Because unlike X.25 you could just download BSD source spin up a Unix with TCP/IP and run everything you could think of or write your own software, you don't need anybody's permission - there's some guy at CERN who has written a "Web browser" which sounds pretty interesting for instance. By the time Torvalds writes his Linux 0.0.1 announcement email, JIPS is the dominant use of JANET and X.25 is on its way to deprecation. It was all bundled together with this free software I got, 100% legit. It seems to work pretty good, and unless you've got funding from somewhere to use something different I think we should use C / IP / Unix.