On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 02:50:45PM +0200, Cees de Groot wrote:
Edmund Ronald eronald@rome.polytechnique.fr said:
Do you remember the days when computers were mainly found at universities ? Well, Linux has saturated that market, which actually correponds to the initial Un#x design goal.
Small correction: AFAIK, the original Unix design goal was to run telco switches, and it did that a lot for a long time in big numbers. I don't know why exactly it became popular at universities (probable a combination between a port to the popular PDP machine, source availability, and the fact that Unix had the 'by hackers, for hackers' feel), but I'm quite sure it was not the design goal.
"Perhaps paradoxically, the success of the Unix system is largely due to the fact that it was not designed to meet any predefined objectives." - "The UNIX Time-Sharing System", by D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson
It most certainly was not designed with any thought or intention of supporting universities or running telco switches.
See http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/cacm.html. If you only ever read one thing about Unix, read this. It's very short, and contains practically everything worth knowing about Unix. It also has a nice "Back to the Future" flavor to it now that a few decades have passed.
Dave