[TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 1:26 PM, William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:

> DEC's later diagnostics were excellent.  They were copied by a ton of folks
> including Masscomp and Alliant who wrote frighteneningly similar
> diagnostic supervisors.
>

​Can't speak for Alliant but Masscomp and DEC had shared authorship in he
diagnostics group.  The former in C and later in BLISS of course; but the
authors were pretty much the same.   If it works, don't mess with it.  Also
the Tech's were all originally ex-DEC so it made sense - although the
manufacturing guys were ex-DG.​

Actually there was a story I tell.   Both Masscomp and DEC were using the
same HW CAD system at one point.   DEC has a microcode assembler that had
originally been written in PDP-11 assembler and was running compatibility
mode on the Vax.   Masscomp wrote a new microcode assembler that was
"frighteningly similar"  in C that tjt the UNIX guys put together with
lex/yacc and the like one weekend for the HW team.   Knowledge of this made
its way to the mill.   It was also know that  DEC has a number of CAD
libraries that the HW guys had been using to make their board layouts
easier -- discussions occurred over beers at the Mau Kaui...  tapes some
how fell out of cars one night... and DEC had a microcode assembler running
on Ultrix in C and somehow our HW guys stopped complain about some missing
libraries they wanted.

Clem
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