On Mon, Jul 07, 2014, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Which company or individual can sponsor me on a summer trip to Europe?": > All I know is that in 1990 I bought an AT&T UNIX system which > included the AT&T KERNEL, a lot of closed source software and a lot > of open source BSD utilities. There was lots of open source programs > for UNIX, many of them were public domain (similar to the BSD > license). It did have X windows on it, but with my 2 meg of RAM > 386SX, it would not run.
In 1990, I was also using AT&T SVr4 on a 386sx. There was no "open source phenonmenon" at the time - the Open Source world mostly included GNU, Unix stuff from Berkeley (BSD, Vi, TCL/TK, etc.), Columbia University (Kermet), MIT (X11), and little more. GNU was definitely a big piece of the open source world at the time - if not the biggest. > > By 1995, I was purchasing CD ROMs, with BSD (scrubbed after the > lawsuit), which came with a large library of UNIX code, and LINUX > distros (more than one), which came with the BSD libraries. > > GCC did not come into general use (or at all AFAIK) until SUN > started selling Solaris, because SUNOS required you to compile and > link modules to change KERNEL parameters, so it came with a C > compiler and linker. In 1992, I was using SunOS, and although I loved it, I quickly found myself piecementally replacing pieces of it by free software, most of it GNU. By 1994, I was using almost exclusively GNU tools - the GNU fileutils instead of the SunOS (BSD-based) ones, GNU groff instead of AT&T troff, GNU Emacs, Gnu make, Gnu bison instead of yacc, and yes, Gcc and the GNU linker utilities. GNU had a huge imact on my computing in the early 1990s, though definitely not the only free software I used (I also used X11 and Tcl/TK, for example). > > System 5 UNIX did not, you had to have a linker, but not a compiler, > so the C compiler was not included and cost a lot of money. GCC was > popularized so that people could compile things on their SUNS > without spending a lot of money for a compiler. I had AT&T SVr4 *with* a compiler, so this was not an issue for me, but gcc was simply *better*, and got better every day, while the SVr4 C compiler was buggy, outdated, and never improved. Another great thing going for the GNU project stuff was excellent documentation - which sadly didn't inspire GNU's followers :( -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Aug 6 2014, 10 Av 5774 n...@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Isn't Disney World a people trap operated http://nadav.harel.org.il |by a mouse? _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
