[TUHS] Perkin-Elmer Sort/Merge II vs Unix sort(1)

[Bakul Shah via TUHS]

On Jan 17, 2025, at 9:23 AM, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:
> 
> I also think that the design of Perkin-Elmer's Sort/Merge II shows the influence of salespeople forcing developers to tack-on whatever features were required by important customers.  Maybe the clean design of Unix owes a lot to AT&T's operation under the 1956 consent decree that prevented it from entering the computer market.  This may have shielded the system's design from unhealthy market pressures during its critical gestation years.

IIRC sort/merge was/is a pretty major thing on IBM mainframes, with
products from multiple companies. May be Perkin-Elmer were trying
to compete with mainframe sort/merge products? Also, I suspect that
for sorting terabytes of data Unix sort likely won't work as fast as
mainframe sorts....