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The success of UNIX is inseparable from C and vice versa. C made UNIX one of the first portable operating systems and, by virtue of being low-level, provided pe
by danieldk 11y ago
The success of UNIX is inseparable from C and vice versa. C made UNIX one of the first portable operating systems and, by virtue of being low-level, provided performance.
- pjmlp 11y agoThe same could be said of OSes using Algol and Mesa. They just hadn't successful startups using them.
- danieldk 11y agoThere are good reasons that these startups weren't using OSes using Algol and Mesa. You seem to imply that the success of C and Unix is some historical accident as a result of two startups picking Unix randomly, and their choice was bit a function of the technical properties of UNIX and C. Which, is of course, nonsense. Sun used Unix because Sun was co-founded by Bill Joy. By that time, Joy was already deeply involved in Unix (per BSD). If he didn't find Unix and C likeable and up to the task, they would have made different choices. SGI and Sun were just one of many catalyzers, like a lot of programming languages have catalyzers.
- pjmlp 11y agoYou just confirmed what I said. The startups that have chosen UNIX, did so because the owners were part of the American UNIX university culture. A different background would have mean a very different history in mainstream OSes and their respective system programming languages. In Europe C had very little meaning until most enterprises started to replace their mainframes by UNIX servers from those companies.