[TUHS] origin of null-terminated strings
Douglas McIlroy
douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu
Sat Dec 17 08:26:19 AEST 2022
> To what extent were the Unix folks at Bell Labs already familiar with DEC systems before the PDP-7?
Some awareness, but no hands-on experience,
> was any thought given to trying to get a 360 system?
Very serious thought. However, virtual memory was a non-negotiable
desideratum, to which Gene Amdahl was implacably opposed because
demand paging would devastate hardware performance. Soon after GE got
the nod, IBM revealed Gerrit Blaauw's skunk-works project, the 360/67,
but by then the die had been cast. Michigan bought one and built a
nice time-sharing system that was running well before Multics.
Doug
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