[TUHS] PWB - what is the history?

[Jon Forrest]

On 5/15/2018 7:59 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> So what's the back story with PWB?  It seems like sort of a back water
> but as I recall, they had some interesting stuff.  I feel like there
> was a "learn" command and another one that tried to tell you about
> common grammer (english, not yacc) problems in your prose.  So far
> as I know, those didn't make it into the mainstream, or if they did,
> they were weak reimplementations that didn't work as well as the
> originals.

We used PWB at Ford Aerospace in the late 70s. It might have been
the closest to a commercial Unix version there was back then. John 
Mashey had a lot to do with PWB so maybe he can say a few words about
it if he's on here.

It's ironic - back in the late 70s there were almost as many
variations of Unix as there are Linux distributions now. It made the
commercial software vendors crazy because each required separate
development and QA resources, and none of them had enough traction
to be the only version that a vendor would support (like maybe
RedHat now).

Jon Forrest