On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 10:43 AM, <iking@killthewabbit.org> wrote:
Interesting - what's your source?  It was also my understanding they used the -7 'because it was there' but that they had pitched for a PDP-10, which had TOPS-10.  - Ian

*laugh*

Doug, weren't you department head at the time, or did that come later?

        - Dan C.


Sent from my android device.

-----Original Message-----
From: Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>
To: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org
Sent: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 4:06 AM
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

> It's always been a bit of a mystery to me why Thompson and Ritchie decided they needed to write a new executive - UNICS - rather than use DECsys.

It was the other way around. They had conceived a clean, simple, yet
powerful, operating system and needed a machine to build it on. A
cast-off PDP-7 happened to be at hand.

Doug
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