[TUHS] Windows roots and Unix influence (was Re: Happy birthday, Ken Thompson!)

[Tony Finch]

Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [...] But much VMS, whatever HP minicomputer stuff was floating around
> (MPE?) and all VM/CMS (I guess it was actually VM/ESA by that time)
> disappeared; VAXstations, serial terminals and 3179G's were all replaced
> by PCs running Windows and the users were replaced by these smiling
> robots. It was weird.
>
> Somehow, most of the Unix people managed to escape. I wonder why? [...]
>
> I wonder, too, if Unix networking didn't play a major role. I have this dim
> sense that NT was designed for a world in which it was still assumed that
> the OSI suite was going to win the networking wars. [...]

I was in my late teens around that time but I got the impression that in
the early to mid 1990s when this shift was happening, networking was
moving to IP and all the IP software was Unix - certainly it was the only
option if you wanted to run network services at the scale of a University
or ISP. At the same time Windows was all about workgroup-scale office
networking. I don't think their network protocols were OSI but Exchange
was based on X.400 and to this day still only does Internet mail
grudgingly.

Tony.
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