[TUHS] Happy birthday, core dumped

[Dan Cross]

The paper with that quote is still linked from dmr's page:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html



On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 11:03 AM, Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.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.
>
> ======
>
> I think Doug's source is in the class `personal observation.'
> He was there at the time; Ken and Dennis's department head, if
> I've got it right.
>
> Remember that Bell Labs had just disengaged itself from the
> Multics project.  The interest in a new OS sprang partly
> from the desire to have a comfortable multi-user system
> now that Multics was no longer available.  That's why the
> DEC operating systems of the time, which were (as I understand
> it) simple single-user monitors, didn't fill the bill.
>
> The character of the players matters too: remember that
> Ken is the guy who one night sat down to write a Fortran
> compiler because real systems have Fortran, and ended up
> inventing B instead.
>
> I've read that there was indeed a pitch to buy a PDP-10; that
> there was some complicated plan to lower the effective cost;
> and that upper management (not Doug) turned it down because
> `Bell Labs doesn't do business that way.'  I think I got that
> from Dennis's retrospective paper, published in the 1984
> all-UNIX issue of the Bell Labs Techical Journal, a must-read
> (along with the late-1970s all-UNIX issue of BSTJ) for anyone
> on this list.
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